Matthew Burner was one of our TJEF fellows working as an intern at the Law office of Alexander Johnson. Over the course of the summer Matt spent time side by side with Alex learning the what it takes to be a lawyer in Silicon Valley.  Law was the focus, however; Matt learned many other valuable life lessons under Alex’s mentoring.

            “I really enjoyed my internship with Alex. Going into it, I was under the assumption that it would mostly deal with law and while that was certainly a major part of it, I also was able to catch a glimpse into the life of an entrepreneur. I really enjoyed being able to see and participate in the work that goes into building cases and claims, something I had very little knowledge about before the internship. One often reads of big settlements in newspapers but working at Alex’s office allowed me to understand how much time...."

My name is John Ainikkal and I am currently a junior at Purdue University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. I was born and raised in India until I was 11. I then moved to Saudi Arabia for middle school. After that, I went to a boarding school, Western Reserve Academy, for high school where I had the opportunity to meet Kenneth Kaufman, and he has served as an excellent resource for me ever since.

Over the course of my first year in college, Ken and I had several Skype calls discussing what I envisioned my career to be and what I hoped to get out of my engineering degree. To get a feel for what I wanted in my professional career, I decided I wanted to gain experience with a startup company to see what this setting had to offer. The next step was to find a company that was innovative, interesting, and engineering oriented.  The John Ernest Foundation....