I will be graduating in maths within few months and I’m looking for exciting opportunities in startups. I know little python, but it may not be enough for a developer position. Can you suggest some skills that can help to get into startups?
I want to spend some time with startups before founding my own company.
Maths and development are very different matters. Knowing maths is helpful to develop, and knowing dev languages is helpful to practice maths. But it's different. Do you want to be a developer with maths skills ? Probably not. But if you want to use your mathematical skills in computer science, there are many ways. Think big data, analytics and metrics. Big data analysis is a very young and promising field, with large budgets spent by big companies. If you like this side of maths, you will easily find startups in this domain.
If you're interested in Python and Open Source Development, try doing online tutorials / challenges and putting links to your code on your CV (Ideally on github / bitbucket / launchpad). This will show potential employers that you "really" are interested and give them examples of your code. Python.org is a great place for research, asking questions, getting connections and starting your career.
All depends on the type of math you specialized in and enjoy.
There are great opportunities in the Big Data side - not as a data scientist (although there is opportunity there) but on the algorithm development side. Basically there are a plethora of algorithms developed in academia which have not yet (and maybe never will be) imported into the machine learning/Big Data space. The maths aspect is both to convert these algorithms into cloud capable scalability - which is a computer science type endeavor - as well as the automation of the parameterization - which (in my limited understanding view) seems like a much more maths oriented need. I'd look at companies like Mahout, Spark, H20, etc to see what opportunities might be there such that you could learn about that space before heading out to seek your own strike in algo mining.