Depends a lot on what role you're looking to fill.<p>There's very little meaningful strategy/business work that can be moved to a new hire. Most very young companies still have terrible development practices, which makes it hard to quickly plug in a new technical hire.<p>I think there are three possible ways it might work.<p>1) You're willing to act as an executive assistant, doing whatever crap work comes up (market research, building slide decks, arranging meetings, filtering email, buying lunch) in return for exposure<p>2) They see you as a strong potential future hire and are thus willing to invest in training you up for 1-2 months as a sort of extended job interview.<p>3) They have a non-critical, self-contained side project you can come in and completely own. Examples include wireframing/designing a new site or feature, beginning a real content marketing strategy, understanding & documenting existing code & processes, etc.<p>#2 is the best for you, since you'll get "real" work. #3 is good, but I've seen teams give something which is a little bit too optional and then never integrate the final result, making it a worthless portfolio piece. #1 is the most boring and you'll probably have to switch companies after the stint to be considered a "real" team member, but it's probably the easiest to get into and would be a chance to trial the startup experience in general.