Secrecy, swag and $10k a month: meet Silicon Valley’s gilded interns

Internapalooza provides an inside look at the peculiar cultural initiation to the tech industry: coding, entrepreneurship and a certain amount of privilege

There were piles of free stuff at Internapalooza, the annual gathering of thousands of tech industry summer interns. In the club level at the San Francisco Giants' stadium on Monday evening, name-tag-sporting millennials travelled in packs of three and four as they scooped up branded T-shirts, tote bags, water bottles, Moleskin notebooks, sunglasses, argyle socks from Zillow, mobile device charge pads from eBay, winter caps from Google, flip flops from Andreessen Horowitz, and - the overall favorite - selfie sticks and throw pillows from YouTube.

Almost everything was free. Everything except the popcorn.