Name: Jude Stanion
Hometown: Durham, NC
University: University of North Carolina ’12
Urban Connectivity, Downtown Project Las Vegas
 
What initially attracted you to Venture for America?

It was encouraging to see that someone else saw opportunity in cities that most have forgotten. Before joining Venture For America, I’d lived in both Detroit and New Orleans. VFA’s commitment to these cities sparked my commitment to the fellowship.

What is the best part of being a VFA Fellow?

VFA has changed the way I see the world. I realized the importance of taking an active and applied role in the world around me. I also began to appreciate the opportunity I (and every other VFA fellow) have to build and create great change. Having 40 super cool friends is nice too.

What does Downtown Project do?

The Downtown Project is trying to revitalize Downtown Vegas. Instead of betting everything on a ‘silver bullet’ project to fix the city in one fell swoop, we’re investing in community, starting small and then scaling up. We’re trying to think of the city as a start up. This kind of approach has never been tried before, which is exactly why it just might work.

What do you do on a typical day at work?

I’m focusing on Urban Connectivity: everything from walking, biking, buses, and carsharing, basically creating mobility options and a lifestyle that isn’t dependent on automobiles. Day to day this might be working with start-ups who are developing innovative bikeshare systems, discussing locations for new express bus lines with the City, or figuring out how Nevada state laws are inhibiting urban innovators, and lobbying for change.

What’s your favorite thing about Las Vegas?:

Another Fellow and I found a miniature horse racing game in one of the old casinos Downtown. You you bet a quarter on a pair of little metal horses as they circulate the track. It probably has some of the lowest odds in the whole casino, but it just seems more real than everything else. There’s the excitement of watching your little horses and pulling for them as they fall behind, the crush of defeat when neither of your horses win, and the exhilaration when you win and the quarter you put in is now fifty cents.

What do you hope to accomplish in your time with VFA?

I really don’t see ‘my time with VFA’ as just the two year fellowship. In someways, the whole of my career will be ‘my time with VFA’. I want to look back on these first few years in Las Vegas and know that I built something and created opportunity. I walked into a sparse and struggling town, and want to someday walk away from a vibrant and bountiful community.

Below is a guest blog post from 2012 Fellow Sean Pennino, who began working with a startup called Teespring in Providence through VFA back in August. Recently, Sean and his company received some very exciting news, and VFA couldn’t be more proud to be partnered with Teespring and founder Walker Williams during this exciting time.

Name: Bryant Yik
Hometown: Union City, NJ
University: University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School ’12
Director of Client Operations,  MoFuse, LLC
Providence, RI
What initially attracted you to Venture for America?
I’ve always loved the process of building something; to see how small pieces can come together and make a complete object. After I took a business course in high school, my love for building things eventually evolved into the idea of building companies. So when VFA came along, I thought it was the best choice for me (just short of creating my own company). I saw VFA as transition between college and actually starting my own business in that as a Fellow, I am not only contributing to MoFuse, but learning about the challenges startups like MoFuse have.
What is the best part of being a VFA Fellow?
The best part is VFA helping us integrate into the local entrepreneurial community. In Providence, VFA introduced us to the local startup incubator, BetaSpring. Every week, we are invited to BetaSpring’s mentor discussions where they have an entrepreneur or business leader to speak to its portfolio company founders over dinner and drinks.  It is a great way for us to socialize with the city’s entrepreneurs and receive advice and talk about ideas.
What does MoFuse do?
MoFuse provides a platform so that small and medium sized businesses can create mobile websites. We offer do-it-yourself (DIY) solutions for business owners to create their own sites and also custom site build services.
What do you do on a typical day at work?
The benefit of working for a startup is that I can experience a little bit of everything. I am currently managing a project that involves coordinating our internal team with and external consulting firm and our client. I also manage the relationship and expectation of another client, and I am working on a retention plan for lost clients. So my typical day usually consists of internal meetings, phone calls with clients, or analyzing customer data.
What’s your favorite thing about Providence?
Providence has a great quality of offering the same amenities of a larger city, but on a much smaller scale. There are great restaurants to eat at and events to attend to which are all within a small proximity and without the crowdedness that comes with being in a city like New York.
What do you hope to accomplish in your time with VFA?
After spending two years in the trenches with a startup, I hope to gain a lot of insights on running a company. Not only am I learning from my company’s successes and strengths, but also from its failures and weaknesses. With this, I hope to one day make a great and lasting company.

Recently, VFA Founder Andrew Yang wrote an article for the Huffington Post about the difference between running a non-profit and for-profit company based on his time at Manhattan Prep and Venture for America. Read the article below, and be sure to subscribe to Andrew’s articles on the Huffington Post.

Running a Non-Profit vs. Running a Company

December 11, 2012
Originally published on Huffington Post

Prior to Venture for America, I was the head of Manhattan Prep, an education company. I occasionally get asked which I like better – running a company or a non-profit.

Let me provide the caveat that I don’t consider myself a non-profit guy by nature. When I was first thinking about what would become Venture for America, I was trying to figure out how to solve a problem – that our top young people were being driven to roles that did not, to me, address the needs of our time. That VFA would be a non-profit just seemed like the most efficient way to solve the problem.

Now, having done both, I feel that there are several discrete differences that cut both positively and negatively with a non-profit:

1. You’re serving two audiences (at least)

The biggest difference is that most non-profits lack a direct feedback mechanism. Let’s say you have a business selling chocolate chip cookies. People tell you, “Mm-mmm! Your cookies are delicious!” More importantly, they show you how much they like the cookies by buying them, telling their friends, etc. Your business grows, and you spend the money on more cookie stands, better marketing, maybe even different and improved recipes, etc. Your feedback is direct, immediate and appropriately self-reinforcing (the GMAT business was like this).

In the non-profit world, your feedback is much more indirect. To stretch the example above, you’re giving the cookies away. You then go to donors and say, “Look at these cookies! See how much everyone likes them? You should give me the resources to bake some more.” How many contributions you get is related to the quality of the cookies, but it’s also related to what people think of the cookies (without eating them), how good you are at describing the cookies, how many people you can tell about the cookies, etc.

In the non-profit world, there’s service delivery (in our case, recruiting top college graduates, training and mentoring them, placing them at start-ups and growth companies in areas of need for 2 years, etc.) and then there’s fund-raising. They’re generally two very different activities with different competencies and audiences.

It’s easy to see how non-profits become engrossed in catering to donors, which may or may not be the best thing at all times, while if a company is ultra-engaged with its customers it’s universally positive and helpful.

2. Goodwill is the coin of the realm

Back in 2001, my first start-up was mentioned in the New York Times and USA Today. I figured that would drive thousands of visitors to the site and tons of new business. Instead, only a handful of people visited our site and not much business came of it at all. It turns out that most people don’t drop everything and go visit the site of a company they read about. As a result, I developed a pretty deep skepticism of the business value of articles and press coverage. At Manhattan GMAT, we didn’t get much press, yet we enjoyed continuous growth for years because our customers had great results.

On the flip side, there are businesses that enjoy a great deal of attention, enthusiasm and goodwill that didn’t succeed. Color was a much-hyped start-up that raised $40 million and almost immediately disappeared. People love Twinkies and everyone knows about them, yet Hostess went bankrupt. Attention and commercial success have an uncertain relationship in business.

I’ve found this to be different in the non-profit world. Press and goodwill matter a lot. Narratives are important. Your audience (donors, foundations, companies, individuals, etc.) all enjoy the sense that people care about what the organization is doing. You ask people for things all of the time (e.g. donations, in-kind services, work at a discount to market, etc.) and they need to be motivated by something bigger than themselves or personal benefit.

Goodwill, it turns out, is much more likely to happen in-person. When we were starting out, I was looking for ways to avoid what I regarded as the event trap – non-profits would spend $200k on an event to raise $300k. I thought to myself, “That’s silly. Why not just get the $300k and skip the event?” Then, when I tried it, it turns out that people would much rather give money if they show up to something and experience what the organization is doing. (Note – at our first Summer Celebration in 2012, we raised $365k on expenses of about $65k. That revenue-cost ratio was only possible because IAC donated the space, vendors donated goods, etc.)

In the business context, unless you’re an event or concert or conference business, getting in front of people is typically a marketing expense. In the non-profit context, getting in front of people is crucial- it drives goodwill which drives your growth.

3. Your incentives are different

I believe in what we’re doing here at Venture for America wholeheartedly, and I know that the same is true for the team, Board Members, and everyone who supports us. It certainly makes it more exciting to do one’s job if you believe in the mission and feel like you can help advance it every day.
That said, there are non-profit guidelines that make it easy to over-rely on this intrinsic motivation. Many non-profits have very conservative pay scales that make it difficult to reward and advance high performers. This can lead to an unfortunate dynamic where you lose people who can help drive the organization forward.

At Manhattan GMAT, I believed in creating a positive work environment and culture, and we invested in it heavily. But I also believed in rewarding people financially at the market rate for a job well done. The last thing anyone should want is for a non-profit to rely upon the personally privileged, young and idealistic, or worse yet, less-than-stellar performers to dedicate their professional lives to the organization. You want ambitious, high-efficiency superstars to view the organization as a place to build their careers. This is simultaneously easier and harder to pull off at a non-profit, but on balance it becomes harder over time (we’re working on ways to mitigate this).

So, if you ask me personally, which do I prefer? I’d have to say I prefer the business context. I love the direct feedback. I don’t think having to frame and package everything you do is terribly efficient (and I’m not the type who really loves the messaging component). And I particularly like the ability to reward people who do excellent work in every way possible, including monetarily.

My preferences aside, Venture for America being a non-profit was 100% the right decision. We’re much better positioned to be able to achieve our mission as a result. We’ve raised $1.2 million to date and have a similar amount mission:

To revitalize American cities and communities through entrepreneurship.
To enable our best and brightest to create new opportunities for themselves and others.
To restore the culture of achievement to include value-creation, risk and reward, and the common good

It’s important to know that some problems lend themselves to for-profit solutions, and some lend themselves to non-profit solutions. The trick is balancing it so you can, to the extent possible, get the best of both worlds.

Do you ever wonder what our Fellows are really doing on the ground in Detroit, New Orleans, Providence, Cincinnati and Las Vegas?

To give you a better idea, we asked the Fellows from each city to sum up the past four months in 1 minute or less. They only guideline was to answer the question “How are things going so far?”
So here it is… the Fellow Winter Update. What happens in Vegas no longer stays in Vegas.

Name: Max Nussenbaum
Hometown: Newton, MA
University: Wesleyan University ’12
Advisory Facilitator of Strategic Partnership Systems Marketing, Management, and Analysis,
Are You a Human
Detroit, MI
What initially attracted you to Venture for America?
VFA was entirely different from any other post-college possibility I’d seen, and that was a great thing. There was something amazing about the opportunity to go do something completely new: to work for a company I’d never heard of, in a field I thought I’d never enter, in a city I’d never been to, surrounded by people I didn’t know before, as part of a program that hadn’t existed a year ago. The possibilities in that newness were intoxicating.
What is the best part of being a VFA Fellow?
The groupies. Definitely the groupies.
What does Are You a Human do?
Are You a Human creates quick branded minigames that replace CAPTCHA, the detested scourge of the internet. CAPTCHAs infuriate users, decrease submission rates, and are rumored to have been a contributing factor in Amy Winehouse’s death. PlayThru, our alternative, is so fun that one guy actually wrote us to say he sometimes plays them for fun.
What do you do on a typical day at work?
What don’t I do for my company? On a typical day, I might be writing the delightful copy for our new web site, creating hilarious company videos, conning my way into getting a phone call with the head developer at a major airline, partnering with sketchy Germans to help translate our latest games, and receiving jujitsu massage from the team of supermodel masseuses we keep on retainer. (Just kidding about the masseuses.)
What’s your favorite thing about Detroit?:
Detroit is like a small town in a big city—everyone seems to know everyone else, both within the start-up world and outside of it. Each morning the streets are filled with an eclectic mix of entrepreneurs, hipster artists, old-time Detroiters, and aggressive (but surprisingly polite) bums. Plus, rent is unbelievably cheap: my closet here is bigger than the apartments of everybody I know in New York combined.
What do you hope to accomplish in your time with VFA?
I hope to develop a network of close friendships that will last throughout this life and into the next one, to help Are You a Human become the most valuable company in world history, and to be singlehandedly responsible for Detroit’s transformation into America’s most populous city. Also, I hope to become better at setting realistic goals.