{"id":284160,"date":"2025-10-07T14:40:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T14:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/284160\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T14:40:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T14:40:09","slug":"a-19-year-old-nba-intern-landed-a-private-meeting-with-la-clippers-ceo-from-a-cold-email-she-told-him-to-do-work-that-you-can-do-for-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/284160\/","title":{"rendered":"A 19-year-old NBA intern landed a private meeting with LA Clippers CEO from a cold email\u2014she told him \u2018to do work that you can do for free\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Gen Zer didn\u2019t have industry connections or an NBA pedigree\u2014just a willingness to mop floors and do laundry for his college basketball team.<\/a> That grit not only landed Daniel Sung a coveted internship with one of the league\u2019s most innovative franchises\u2014while millions in his generation are stuck unemployed<\/a>\u2014it also put him face-to-face with LA Clippers C-suite.<\/p>\n

While most interns were content with group \u201clunch and learn\u201d, the 19-year-old marketing intern decided to shoot his shot and directly cold-emailed his division\u2019s CEO for a private one-to-one conversation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really wanted to learn from her,\u201d Sung told Fortune. Every week, the entire cohort of interns would have weekly meet-and-greets with LA Clippers\u2019 senior leadership team\u2014and Sung made it his personal mission to corner every single one for a personal catch up before his internship was up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI actually got in a little bit of trouble from HR,\u201d he laughed. \u201cBut 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\u2019s also hard to be more vulnerable and get really tailored advice otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was very strategic, so that they could always see me passing them,\u201d Sung said. <\/p>\n

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\u2019d make sure to cross paths with her\u2014just so that he could exchange a smile and maybe even niceties with the big boss. \u201cI needed her to recognize me,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t easy. Zucker didn\u2019t 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<\/a> with posts about his internship in a bid to get noticed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI emailed the secretary, saying I\u2019m going to leave very soon, but I really need to talk to her.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Eventually, his persistence worked. Zucker\u2019s chief of staff saw one of Sung\u2019s LinkedIn posts titled Five Lessons I Learned in Five Weeks at the LA Clippers\u2014a post that went viral on the platform and gained traction inside the office too. \u201cThat gave me a lot of positive attention, and really sparked the ears of a lot of the C suite executives,\u201d Sung added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Soon after, her office reached out to schedule the one-on-one meeting.<\/p>\n

Gillian Zucker\u2019s advice for the Gen Zer<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI told her to be honest, I don\u2019t think I really know what I want to do in life yet. I\u2019m still 18. (I was 18 at the time) and I have so many interests,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI love sports, I love consulting, I love marketing, but I don\u2019t know where all ties in. What do you think is something that I can do to really find out what I want to do?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then, she asked me, \u2018What would you do for free?\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a> to prove his passion for the industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to do work like that that really inspires you\u2014you have to do work that you can do for free,\u201d Zucker told him. \u201cIt 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\u2019ll be happy and you\u2019ll be able to learn from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fortune has reached out to the NBA for comment.<\/p>\n

A single email can change your career<\/p>\n

Job-seekers are all turning to out-of-the-box ways to advance their careers, from delivering donuts<\/a> to Silicon Valley bosses, to waitressing at tech conferences<\/a> to hand out CVs. But actually, simply cold emailing employers isn\u2019t a bad way to stand out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Just like Sung, when Figma\u2019s billionaire<\/a> 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 \u201cheroes\u201d<\/a> to invite them out for coffee. He also hit up the inbox of former fellow interns and peers <\/strong>from LinkedIn<\/a>, Flipboard<\/a>, and O\u2019Reilly Media\u2014and it worked.<\/p>\n

Likewise, Nespresso\u2019s 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<\/a>\u2014he instantly offered her an internship which snowballed into a 5 year career at the likes of Louis Vuitton, Chanel<\/a> and Gucci.<\/p>\n

Google<\/a> executive Sameer Samat got his start by plucking up the courage to cold-email<\/a> one of the biggest names in his industry: Google<\/a> cofounder Sergey Brin.<\/p>\n

The CMO of $7.2 billion <\/a>company Squarespace<\/a> even calls cold-calling employers<\/a> the \u201clife hack to avoiding long interview processes.\u201d 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\u2014stating she was even willing to do without a paycheck.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d Mathur told Fortune<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fortune Global Forum<\/strong> returns Oct. 26\u201327, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and global leaders will gather for a dynamic, invitation-only event shaping the future of business. Apply for an invitation.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This Gen Zer didn\u2019t have industry connections or an NBA pedigree\u2014just a willingness to mop floors and do…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":284161,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1339,1582,276,17900,16778,18313,3991,41171,32224,2961,224,5337,37352,126013],"class_list":{"0":"post-284160","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-career-advice","12":"tag-careers","13":"tag-chief-executive-officer-ceo","14":"tag-gen-z","15":"tag-interns","16":"tag-internships","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-losangeles","20":"tag-national-basketball-association","21":"tag-the-interview-playbook"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115333406871913479","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}