WHERE ARE THEY NOW: The first interns of the world's biggest tech companies

Uber, Google, and Facebook are among the biggest, most powerful tech companies in the world.

But when they were founded, these companies were scrappy startups with small staffs. They hired interns — usually college kids or recent grads — to help keep things chugging along.

So where are the earliest interns from these companies now? We did some research to find out. In some cases, these companies' first interns have stayed onboard, moving up to new positions. Others have left to start their own companies or pursue other ventures.

Twitter's first intern, Kevin Systrom went on to found Instagram, which he sold for $1 billion to Facebook

After graduating from Stanford in 2006 with degrees in engineering and management science, Kevin Systrom interned for Odeo, the company that would eventually become known as Twitter.

After his internship, he worked at several tech companies: he had a stint at Google, at a travel advice website called Nextstop, and finally, a startup he founded called Burbn. Burbn would eventually morph into what's known today as Instagram. Today, Systrom is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Instagram.

Facebook's first intern, Darian Shirazi, became CEO and founder of Radius

Darian Shirazi became the first intern for Facebook when he was 19. Prior to that, at age 15, he had caught eBay's eye as a power seller on the website. The company invited him to intern there when he was 15. He stayed on for two summers in high school.

He stayed on board at Facebook, reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg, for two years, first as an intern and then as a software engineer. He left to take classes at Berkeley at his parents' request. Now, Shirazi is the founder and CEO of Radius, a company that collects data about small businesses for sales and marketing purposes.

WeWork is now a $5 billion co-working space, and its first intern Alex Seeman, still works there as a digital product manager

Alex Seeman was an early intern at WeWork, the $5 billion company that divides up big, rented office spaces and sublets them to startups and other businesses.

Seeman started as an intern at WeWork in summer 2012, and now serves as a Digital Product Manager at the company.

One member of Pinterest's first intern class was Jeffrey Warren, who is now a software engineer at Wellframe

One of Pinterest's earliest interns, who was part of the company's first official "Pintern" class, was Jeffrey Warren. As an MIT student and intern, Warren designed and built Pinterest's price drop notification feature, which lets pinners know when the products they've pinned go on sale. 

“During my internship, we had two Make-a-thons," Warren said at the time. "I designed and prototyped real-time price drop notifications for the first, and spent most of my time afterward building and scaling the product." Now, Warren is a software engineer for Boston-based digital health company Wellframe.

Square's first intern, Aaron Dias-Melim, is still at the company in a product marketing manager role.

Aaron Dias-Melim was the first intern at payments company Square. Dias-Melim started off working on content for Square's support team while he was still attending the University of San Francisco in 2010.

Since then, Dias-Melim has held various roles at the company, including Marketing Associate and Creative Producer. Now, Dias-Melim is a Product Marketing Manager at Square.

Uber's first intern, Austin Geidt, now has a huge role at the company as its Head of Global Expansion

Geidt started at Uber as an overdressed intern and employee number four in 2010; she says she struggled for the first few months.

At first, her job wasn’t well defined. She did things like hand out flyers to passersby and cold-call potential drivers. She also took customer service calls at three in the morning.

But now she heads up Uber’s global expansion team, which has brought Uber's operations to over 300 markets and 56 countries in just five years.

Google's first intern, Jen Fitzpatrick, is still at the company and serves as VP of Engineering for geo and local.

Jen Fitzpatrick is a Google veteran. She started out at Google as an intern in 1999, and was one of the company's first female engineers. Fitzpatrick, who helped co-found Google's user experience team, has serviced as the head of software development for a number of Google products, including AdWords, Google News, and Google Search.

Earlier this year she replaced Brian McClendon as the head for Google Maps. She now leads the product and engineering efforts for Google's geo and local products, including local search and Google Places. 

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