Honestly having a startup take on an intern sounds nuts to me... I don't really have any sound basis for advice since my only experience with interns was having

Honestly having a startup take on an intern sounds nuts to me... I don't really have any sound basis for advice since my only experience with interns was having them join my team at BigCo this summer, so other comments here are probably better suggestions. Still here are a few thoughts that come to mind you might want to chew on. Imagine yourself as a part time employee rather than an intern. Imagine if you don't figure out how to impress, you'll be fired. (As an intern you're basically fire-proof.) This means that you need to become more autonomous and take the initiative. If something is unclear, creatively interpret it into something that is clear, and work on that. Make some progress, or write up the more concrete version, and get feedback. While waiting for feedback make more progress. If you are blocked, ping other people on the team to see if you can help them out with anything, or if nothing else find bugs, fix bugs, and/or write test code. There is always stuff to do. You mentioned an example task "tell whether a picture is of a bird", if that's all I had to go on then I'd search for a few online image classification service providers and write a shell script or whatever to send the picture to them and report back. Done. When showing the implementation or the write-up in review, if there's something that the CEO doesn't like about the solution (he wanted you to do it by hand, or wanted you to use a particular machine learning or computer vision toolkit, or integrated with a web api, or wanted you to go out and take a bunch of reference pictures to train a neural net on...) then his complaints will make what he originally wanted more clear. Repeat. For the remote aspect in particular, schedule a daily (or at the very least every other day) one-on-one meeting over Hangouts or Skype with the CEO. Time box it to 15 minutes though 30 might not be bad either. If the CEO can't make these, ask him to find someone who can and who will effectively become your new supervisor. You want these meetings to first be about any concerns you want to raise (like feeling directionless, or that some deadline is too hard for the vagueness of the task) and second about your general activities of the previous and coming day so people are in the loop with what you're up to. Also encourage the whole team to get on irc/hipchat/slack/matrix in an all-team channel. Assuming the company consists of more than just you and the CEO, it's crucial you have contact with some portion of the rest of the team, and be able to ping them in real time to ask "can we jump on a hangout meeting real quick to discuss x / share my screen and look at y?"