Hosted by Ava Swinton and Inna Swinton - Intern to Empire features candid conversations with high performing students and young professionals and some more experienced guests reflecting on what worked (and what didn’t). We explore how they found mentors, built proof, and created momentum from high school to college to first key opportunities. We explore the mentors, decisions, and pivots behind each path, so that listeners can find their next step faster.
Intern to Empire S2 Ep. 1 w/ Will Mckelvey - Capitol Hill to Venture Capital: The Art of the Pivot
Intern to Empire Season 2, Episode 1 is live!
We are back for a new and incredible season!!
This week we sat down with Will McKelvey, an investor at Lerer Hippeau in New York. Before Will moved to NYC, he got his MBA at UC Berkeley where he started his own small venture fund. And even before that he spent almost five years working in Congress on economic policy. Will argues that venture-backed companies are the most powerful economic engine in the US economy.
Will did not have much of a network in the venture world when he decided to make the pivot. But everything he did, every extracurricular, every internship, was oriented around how to achieve the goal. Watch the episode to hear exactly what his mentor told him to do to land his job at Lerer Hippeau.
We discuss why your hit rate on good decisions matters less than the volume of them, and why the best thing you can send a mentor is an update with no ask.
Our favorite line: “All advice overtime nets to zero. Follow your gut. Intuition is the only thing we have that artificial intelligence does not.”
Co-hosted with @innaswinton writer, actress, producer, and lawyer).
Link in bio for the full episode!
#VentureCapital #Investing #EarlyCareer #Internships #Podcast
19 Aug 2026
Intern to Empire Ep. 25 w/ Alexander Bello - Broadway at 10, USC at 18, and Making Your Own Work
Intern to Empire Ep. 25 is live! 🎉 Our Season 1 finale.
This week we sat down with Alexander Bello to talk about what happens when the roles stop coming and you decide to write your own!
Alex made his Broadway debut at 10 in All My Sons, then did Caroline, or Change and The Tap Dance Kid, booked his first feature in Theater Camp, won a Sundance award with the cast, and recurred on HBO's And Just Like That. Then he hit the age where Broadway mostly stops casting teenagers - so he picked up a camera.
This spring, during his senior year of high school, he wrote and directed Hide, a horror-thriller about a mother and son at odds over a family heirloom. He raised $6,000 on Kickstarter, pulled together a 30-person crew ranging from 15 to 50 years old, and shot the whole thing in three days. It's about to start its festival run. In the fall he heads to USC film school.
We also get into why he calls it redirection instead of rejection, the 156-page screenplay he wrote at 13 for himself and a friend, turning down a big Broadway role at 14 and booking Theater Camp four months later, staying humble about the work at school, and the mom who told him he could quit anytime - which is why he never did!
One of our favorite lines from the episode: "No one can ever stop you from going out and getting a camera and making a film."
Co-hosted with @innaswinton (writer, actress, producer, and lawyer).
Link in bio for the full episode.
#Filmmaking #Broadway #USCSCA #IndieFilm #YoungCreatives
14 Aug 2026
Intern to Empire Ep. 24 w/ Aanchal Save - Georgia Tech to Germany: Finding Her Own Way to Publish
Intern to Empire Ep. 24 is live!
This week we sat down with Aanchal Save to talk about what happens when you stop waiting to be handed the interesting work. Aanchal is a rising junior at Georgia Tech studying aerospace engineering and computer science, and she has already interned at NASA, SpaceX, and Palantir.
During her NASA internship, there was a robotic arm sitting in the lab that nobody had assigned her to. So she read a stack of books, built a presentation, and pitched her mentor on working on it in her spare time. She got the green light, wrote a paper, and filed it through NASA’s internal new technology process.
When she learned there was no funding to publish independent work, she found a conference in a small town in Germany, went while she was studying abroad in France, and presented it herself.
We also get into cold outreach and why forty emails for one reply is a fine trade, being the only girl in the lab and learning to own it instead of shrinking, what it actually means to be a good mentee and not just a good mentor, and how she chose the harder summer over the comfortable one.
One of our favorite lines from the episode: “You don’t really need to know what you’re passionate about. It’s more of like, what are you curious about?” Great way to start.
Co-hosted with @innaswinton (https://www.instagram.com/innaswinton/) (writer, actress, producer, and lawyer).
Link in bio for the full episode.
#WomenInSTEM (https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/womeninstem/) #Robotics (https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/robotics/) #Aerospace (https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/aerospace/) #GeorgiaTech (https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/georgiatech/) #Internships (https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/internships/)
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