Business
A 19-year-old NBA intern bagged a private meeting with LA Clippers CEO from a cold email—she told him ‘to do work that you can do for free’
This Gen Zer didn’t have industry connections or an NBA pedigree—just a willingness to mop floors and do laundry for his college basketball team. That grit not only landed Daniel Sung a coveted internship with one of the league’s most innovative franchises—while millions in his generation are stuck unemployed—it also put him face-to-face with LA Clippers C-suite.
While most interns were content with group “lunch and learn”, the 19-year-old marketing intern decided to shoot his shot and directly cold-emailed his division’s CEO for a private one-to-one conversation.
“I really wanted to learn from her,” Sung told Fortune. Every week, the entire cohort of interns would have weekly meet-and-greets with LA Clippers’ senior leadership team—and Sung made it his personal mission to corner every single one for a personal catch up before his internship was up.
“I actually got in a little bit of trouble from HR,” he laughed. “But I knew I needed to talk to all of our C-suite before I left, because when else are you going to be just in that close of a proximity? It’s also hard to be more vulnerable and get really tailored advice otherwise.”
“I was very strategic, so that they could always see me passing them,” Sung said.
Anytime Gillian Zucker, Halo Sports and Entertainment CEO and president of business operations for the LA Clippers would walk on the same floor he was working on, he’d make sure to cross paths with her—just so that he could exchange a smile and maybe even niceties with the big boss. “I needed her to recognize me,” he added. That way she could put a face to a name, when he eventually plucked up the courage to shoot an email her way.
But it wasn’t easy. Zucker didn’t respond to his first email for over a month. So Sung doubled down on his efforts, sending a more urgent follow-up email and plastering LinkedIn with posts about his internship in a bid to get noticed.
“I emailed the secretary, saying I’m going to leave very soon, but I really need to talk to her.”
Eventually, his persistence worked. Zucker’s chief of staff saw one of Sung’s LinkedIn posts titled Five Lessons I Learned in Five Weeks at the LA Clippers—a post that went viral on the platform and gained traction inside the office too. “That gave me a lot of positive attention, and really sparked the ears of a lot of the C suite executives,” Sung added.
Soon after, her office reached out to schedule the one-on-one meeting.
Gillian Zucker’s advice for the Gen Zer
The night before sitting down with Zucker, Sung stayed up until 2 a.m. researching and then rehearsing the perfect questions to ask. But when the meeting came, nerves gave way to honesty.
“I told her to be honest, I don’t think I really know what I want to do in life yet. I’m still 18. (I was 18 at the time) and I have so many interests,” he recalled. “I love sports, I love consulting, I love marketing, but I don’t know where all ties in. What do you think is something that I can do to really find out what I want to do?”
“And then, she asked me, ‘What would you do for free?”
He says the questions instantly brought him back to the time he was mopping floors for the Vanderbilt University basketball team; doing 40-hour weeks of unpaid work to prove his passion for the industry.
“You have to do work like that that really inspires you—you have to do work that you can do for free,” Zucker told him. “It really was the best advice. She said you have to find out your why, what you want to do, the thing that really drives you, and the thing that just by being in that environment, you’ll be happy and you’ll be able to learn from it.”
Fortune has reached out to the NBA for comment.
A single email can change your career
Job-seekers are all turning to out-of-the-box ways to advance their careers, from delivering donuts to Silicon Valley bosses, to waitressing at tech conferences to hand out CVs. But actually, simply cold emailing employers isn’t a bad way to stand out.
Just like Sung, when Figma’s billionaire CEO Dylan Field was 19 years old and looking to get his design tool off the ground, the millennial cofounder also cold-emailed his tech “heroes” to invite them out for coffee. He also hit up the inbox of former fellow interns and peers from LinkedIn, Flipboard, and O’Reilly Media—and it worked.
Likewise, Nespresso’s U.K. CEO Anna Lundstrom got her foot through the door of the notoriously hard-to-break luxury industry thanks to a cold email to an LVMH boss—he instantly offered her an internship which snowballed into a 5 year career at the likes of Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Gucci.
Google executive Sameer Samat got his start by plucking up the courage to cold-email one of the biggest names in his industry: Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
The CMO of $7.2 billion company Squarespace even calls cold-calling employers the “life hack to avoiding long interview processes.” Years before her success in tech, Kinjil Mathur spent her summers as a college student skimming telephone books to find the contacts of businesses and professionals in her city. She would go to the company listings section, and started cold-calling businesses inquiring about internships—stating she was even willing to do without a paycheck.
“I was willing to work for free; I was willing to work any hours they needed, even on evenings and weekends. I was not focused on traveling,” Mathur told Fortune.
