Nonprofit widening path toward entrepreneurship

COMING TOGETHER: Venture for America fellows take part in a Lego competition designed to help participants understand team roles and responsibilities, during a training camp at Brown University. / COURTESY EDDIE SHIOMI
COMING TOGETHER: Venture for America fellows take part in a Lego competition designed to help participants understand team roles and responsibilities, during a training camp at Brown University. / COURTESY EDDIE SHIOMI

Venture for America founder and CEO Andrew Yang thinks the United States has a problem.
“Not enough of our talent is heading toward entrepreneurship, small business and growth businesses,” said Yang, a 1996 graduate of Brown University who’s not waiting around for other people to fix the problem.
“We’re in hurry. It’s a big country and there are a lot of people who want to learn to build businesses and create jobs,” said Yang, who has been on the Brown campus with this year’s 68 Venture for America fellows for the five-week training session that ends July 18.
This is the second year Brown hosted the fellows, providing support with lodging and meeting space, said Yang. The project launched last year with 40 fellows.
Yang is clear about the mission of Venture for America: “To revitalize American cities and communities through entrepreneurship.”
Two additional overarching goals guide the Venture for America initiative. One is “to enable our best and brightest to create new opportunities for themselves and others.” Another goal of the organization is “to restore the culture of achievement to include value-creation, risk and reward and the common good.”
New York-based Venture for America recruits top college graduates, provides five weeks of training through lectures and meetings with seasoned investors and entrepreneurs and then matches each fellow with a startup for two years.
One of the 2013 fellows is 21-year-old Zoe Chaves, who graduated from Brown in May with a focus on architectural studies and urban planning.
“I was taking a course with a professor who was involved with Venture for America,” she said, and what she heard sparked her interest.
“I had an awareness that universities and businesses, especially small businesses, are some of the things that make a city healthy,” said Chaves. She liked the idea of being matched to a startup.
After training, she’ll earn $38,000 a year, with health care options, working at Splitwise, a Providence-based company that stores data in the “cloud” to help people organize and share information to make it easy to split bills, such as dividing rent with roommates or sharing the cost of lunch.
“Splitwise designed a Web tool like a calculator and the goal is equity,” said Chaves.
Skill-building and learning about entrepreneurship during training set her on the right course to start her job at Splitwise, she said. “I had a good amount of faith I’d get a job, but I wasn’t sure I’d get a job I love that advances my career,” she said. “I think this job will be a great fit for me.
“I very much wanted to stay in Providence. I can absolutely imagine building a career here,” said Chaves, who is from New York. “I think when you’re in a place like Rhode Island you can really see the impact of your work.”
Working in smaller cities with startups and seeing the impact of the work is how Yang designed Venture for America.
After he graduated from Brown, he went to law school at Columbia, started a dot.com that went down when the bubble burst in 2001 and was president of Manhattan GMAT, which was acquired. Yang then decided to help change the well-worn routes taken by many of the nation’s bright, young college graduates to cities such as New York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles.
Knowing that many top graduates go into banking, management consulting and law for prestige, good salaries, opportunity for advancement and a professional community, Yang decided to create those advantages with Venture for America.
Large companies have more time and money to recruit top graduates, so Yang made recruiting for startups in lower-cost cities his mission.
The project launched by matching fellows with startups in Providence, Cincinnati, Detroit, New Orleans and Las Vegas.
So far, Venture for America has 19 fellows working full time at startups in Rhode Island, said Yang.
The expansion map includes Baltimore, Cleveland, New Haven, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Raleigh-Durham.
The goal is to bring talent and create jobs that contribute to the vitality of these cities.
Thirty-eight-year-old Yang points to Charlie Kroll, a Brown graduate who founded Providence-based Andera, a venture-backed technology company focused on online banking, as the inspiration that led him to create Venture for America.
Yang recalls being on a panel with Kroll in 2008 when he heard that Kroll didn’t get the job he wanted as an investment banker in New York, so he started a company.
Yang decided to provide a path for top graduates to head directly to startups.
“We have lots of recruiting challenges, just like startups all over the country,” said Kroll. “There’s no question that the unemployment rate is high, nationally, so people think there are lots of people looking for work, but the people with the skills our kind of company hires are really in short supply.” Kroll is on the Venture for America board of directors and Andera was matched with one of the fellows last year and again this year.
“Venture for America gives us an opportunity to hire top talent,” said Kroll. “If you look at where the top college grads are going to work, they’re going to Boston, New York, San Francisco and D.C. to work for big companies that have the resources to recruit on campus.
“It’s very hard for us to attract college grads who got job offers in October of their senior year,” said Kroll. “Certainly technology is the hardest thing to hire for and computer science grads are incredibly hard to recruit. Competition for them is very high.
“Venture for America creates a safe path to work for startups. It creates a safety net,” said Kroll. “If the startup fails, they match you with another company.”
The program is a unique way to bring talent to cities across America, said Kroll.
“It’s certainly an unusual program in the entrepreneurial world. The model is very well-established in education with Teach for America,” he said.
Teach for America provides training, support and career development for people who teach for two years in a low-income community, according to its website.
Yang has raised $6 million, so far, to support Venture for America. Contributors from the Ocean State include the Blackstone Foundation, $150,000; Bhikhajii Maneckji, $50,000; Delta Dental, $25,000; The Rhode Island Foundation, $25,000; Alan Hassenfeld, $5,000 and Kroll and Andera, $3,000, said Yang.
Venture for America’s goal, according to its website, is “to create 100,000 new U.S. jobs by 2025 by helping growth companies expand and by training a critical mass of our top graduates to themselves become business builders and job creators.”
Kroll said he’s an example of how Venture for America can attract talent to smaller cities.
“I graduated from Brown, I started this company here and never left,” said Kroll, whose 13-year-old company now has 100 employees. “These people will spend two years seeing the best of Providence. Some will leave, but many will stay.” •

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