Venture for America is a nonprofit fellowship program for college graduates who want to
learn how to build businesses and create opportunities, become entrepreneurs really.
What we do is we recruit top grads.
We bring them to a training camp for five weeks at Brown University, my alma mater.
We bring in entrepreneurs, investors, venture capitalists, McKenzie, IDO to help train them
in what it takes to build a company.
And then they work in startup companies in Detroit, New Orleans, Providence, Cincinnati
and eight other U.S. cities for two years.
And at the end of those two years they’ll have a sense of how these businesses grow
and develop.
They’ll be working with a more experienced entrepreneur during that time.
At the end of the two years they can either stay at that company as a manager and leader
or they can even start their own companies.
And we have a set of angel investors and a seed fund to invest in them.
So you can think of it as a two year extended entrepreneur apprenticeship program that has
the immediate effect of helping companies expand and hire more people and hopefully
create more jobs.
Our immediate goal as an organization is to help create 100,000 new U.S. jobs by 2025
by helping these companies grow and also training the next generation of entrepreneurs.
So there are six default paths for young smart people in the U.S. today – financial services,
management/consulting, law school, medical school, graduate school/academia and Teach
for America.
So these are six things and these six things will comprise between 50 and 70 percent of
university graduates from any national university in the U.S.
I mean they really add up very quickly.
They also tend to concentrate our talent in one of six geographies – New York City,
San Francisco/Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., Boston, Chicago and L.A. So in essence we
have a system that’s driving our most talented graduates to one of six activities in one
of six places.
And over the long term this is not a great thing for the economy, especially if you consider
that so many of these graduates are heading to professional services contexts that exist
to serve essentially large companies that after they get big enough to a point where
they can hire an investment banker, consulting firm or a law firm.
So the metaphor I use is that it’s like we’re investing in tons of layers of icing
and forgetting to bake the cake.
What we need to do is we need to send more talent to early stage businesses that can
grow and prosper, expand, hire people, maybe even create hundreds of new jobs.
And then if they become mature then they can hire professional services firms to help them
expand in various ways.
But the first order of business is helping the firms come into being and to grow.
36 percent of this year’s Venture for America class was comprised of women.
And we think that’s a good start but not nearly where it needs to be.
We need to get it up to 51 percent to mirror the population and also the college graduate
ratio obviously.
You know, I think people respond very powerfully to role models.
Like they see examples, they want to see someone who’s like them.
And so there are some fellows that are women that come to us and say hey, I’d prefer
a female led company.
And so when we go out to the startup landscape in these cities and you look around, I mean
the proportion of companies that right now – not even in tech but just, you know, in
startups and growth companies in these cities – unfortunately it’s certainly well below
51 percent at least of the companies that we see and interact with.
And so, you know, we see there’s a lot of work to do at every level.
But we think a lot of it does begin as women looking up and saying like hey, who are the
people that are doing this that are like me.
And I think that’s one reason why someone like Sheryl Sandberg has set such a huge powerful
example because now, you know, women look up and see that there are leaders in these
industries that are women that are doing amazing things.
I think there’s certainly a desire among this generation to have a positive impact
to build something new.
And I see this when I interact with college students around the country that they very
badly want that sort of option.
But when the rubber hits the road it’s really about who’s making them a job offer when.
And so if you’re a senior in college and you’re looking for a job, it’s all about
who’s extending you a genuine path and who’s recruiting you, who’s making you feel wanted,
who can you take home to your parents figuratively speaking and say hey, mom, guess what?
I’ve got an offer from Deloitte.
Then your parents will be very, very happy.
So those are the variables that really matter.
Like people talk about the, you know, the wants and needs of the generation which are
obviously very important.
But it’s equally important what are the genuine choices they’re being presented
with.
And those things are a function of resources.
So what Venture for America does is we try and provide a genuine path toward startups
and growth companies in Detroit and New Orleans and other parts of the country that might
not be top of mind for a recent college graduate really by extending some of the same resources.
So that if you join VFA you’ll end up with some of the same network and community and
training and support that many of these young people are seeking through other means.