The Innovation Fund is a four-week crowdfunding competition that gives VFA Fellows the opportunity to launch their business ideas and projects. Nine Fellow-led teams are off to the races sharing their new ventures with the world and hustling to raise as much money as possible on Indiegogo between now and March 16th. 
Steven Mazur and Eric Huang are 2013 Venture for America Fellows who are using both the VFA Innovation Fund and VFA Accelerator to launch Ash & Anvil this spring in Detroit. They are creating a better clothing experience for shorter men and recently kicked off their Indiegogo campaign to fund their initial product launch.  Support their vision by contributing to their campaign.

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By Steven Mazur and Eric Huang
Fashion companies are constantly introducing new products and designs to keep up with modern trends. However, most fashion companies still build their clothing for the average person. Most men’s clothes are designed for the average man who is around 5’10”. While major retailers typically offer petite and plus size options for women, they offer only “big and tall” sections for men. Shorter men face an uphill battle when shopping and lack options from the clothing brands tailored towards them.
Take my own experience, for example. At 5’6”, I’m short. Because of my height, I dread shopping. Trips to the mall take hours and I often leave empty handed. Even when I find clothes, I always have to stop at my tailor on the way home. The entire process is frustrating, time-consuming, and expensive.  My taller friends can generally find their clothes right away and don’t require alterations.
Since major retailers don’t offer “short and small” departments, shorter men typically have limited options:
1. Purchase custom-made or tailored clothing: Shorter men must tailor most of the clothes that they purchase. Some items, such as shorts, polos, and casual button downs can’t be tailored at a worthwhile price. And custom-made clothing is typically too expensive.
2. Try your luck with select brands: Some brands offer certain products that can complement a shorter person’s build. However, these products are often hit-or-miss and there are limited options for shorter men.
There had to be a better way. Shorter men want to enjoy the same shopping experience that taller men do. Because of these challenges, I started Ash & Anvil, a clothing company for shorter men. Our first product – casual button downs – is designed specifically for this demographic.
Our Everyday Shirt fits perfectly in the collar, sleeves, and chest. It provides just the right length to be worn untucked and can be worn at the office or on the weekend. Take a look at the photo below to see a comparison between our well-proportioned design and a similar shirt from Ralph Lauren.

We’re excited to launch a company that gives shorter men the positive shopping experience they deserve. All of our clothes will fit a shorter man right off the rack, saving countless hours at the mall and trips to the tailor. We hope that this will be a step in the right direction towards enriching the lives of shorter men by providing them with fashionable, no-hassle clothes.
 

Originally published on qz.com
In his book Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz describes the current generation of strivers as “driven to achieve without knowing why.” And then they become paralyzed when they’re not sure how to proceed.
I jokingly call the hang-ups associated with a drive to achieve as “the Achievement Demons.” When I was growing up, I’d study for days trying to get good grades. When I’d get an “A,” I’d feel elation for about 30 seconds, and then a feeling of emptiness. Rinse and repeat.
What does achievement look like today? A generation ago, the path was clearer. Become a doctor or a lawyer or a professor (or, in the past 20 years, a banker or a consultant). Join an established company and climb the ladder. But now, the legal profession is shrinking, and under extreme pressure. Academics vastly outnumber tenure track positions, and research funding is down. Doctors complain about how practicing medicine is not what it used to be due to increased regulation and market pressures. Large companies are often contracting due to technological threats even as they are experiencing steady growth.
After graduating from Brown, I went to law school and became a corporate lawyer in New York City. I probably looked pretty conventionally successful as a 24-year-old getting paid $125,000 a year, plus bonus, wearing suits, and living in a Manhattan apartment. But I hated my job, I didn’t admire the people I was working with, and I felt that I was becoming a smaller, less imaginative, less risk-taking, less likable version of myself.
My quest for significance took the form of co-founding an internet company that didn’t work out. In 2001, when the internet bubble burst, my company went out with the tide. That failure was difficult to grapple with.
I went to work for another startup that ran out of money, and then another startup that made software for hospitals. Investors included David Bonderman, the billionaire co-founder of TPG, and Rajat Gupta, the former head of McKinsey (now disgraced for leaking insider information to a hedge fund as a director of Goldman Sachs). I told myself that we were on our way.
I was there for four years, and it turned out we weren’t on our way. Depending on how you counted, this was my third job at a failed company in a row. I was 30, and at that point my confidence had been through the wringer. I felt like my career had stalled. My peers from law school were making substantially more money than I was—they were literally having dinner and birthday parties that I couldn’t afford to attend.
It was around this time that I was approached by Zeke Vanderhoek to become his partner at a test-prep company, Manhattan GMAT. The operation was quite small—a full-time team of six people. It was an unglamorous industry—test prep didn’t have the same ceiling or sense of possibility as a venture-backed healthcare software company. I’d started at Manhattan GMAT as a part-time employee to pay the bills. Now I was going to devote my career to it. You couldn’t spin that at a party.
It turned out to be the best professional decision of my life, in part because I let a lot of stuff go. This was a company where trying to network was of very limited utility, so I kind of gave up on it. I just hunkered down and did whatever I could to make the company grow. The first couple of years, I’d say I worked at Manhattan GMAT and no one would know what I was talking about. But the company kept growing and growing. We eventually became number-one in enrollments in the US. Then, every once in a while someone would say, “I know that company!”
I’d say it took me about seven years after leaving the law firm to let the demons go—to not feel like I was always falling behind my own expectations, or what my peers were doing, or what my parents thought, or my own supposed potential; to view my time intrinsically, as well as instrumentally. And this was the point at which I was able to meaningfully contribute to the success of an organization (and form healthy relationships), in large part because I was more at ease with myself and others.
I’ve learned my demons aren’t just mine. Thousands of young people share the same thirst to achieve that I had (and still have)—rising out of family pressures, alienation, and an identity that they’re smart or talented or special or destined to do something significant. On the plus side, it can make them hard-charging, industrious, and willing to put themselves out there. On the flip side, it can be paralyzing. It can lead to depression, a sense of isolation, even self-destruction. I think it’s harder in an era of social media, where there’s always something you’re missing. FOMO (fear of missing out) is the enemy of valuing your own time.
“I feel this constant pressure to make something of myself,” relates one young person, who now works at a startup after interning at an investment bank. “Even during celebrations, it’s like we’re all plotting the next competition. My friends have a ton of ambition and no clear place to channel it. I get the sense that we’re all trading happiness to run a little faster, even if we’re not sure where.”
There’s a progression from aspiring young man or woman, eager to make a mark, to integrated builder who can hunker down and operate for years. It’s as much a journey of the spirit, about discovering one’s identity and values, as it is a professional challenge. And it doesn’t really end.
I spend time with hundreds of recent college graduates who are facing this struggle, and there’s no easy answer. Again, it’s personal and different people will engage with how best to use their time in different ways.
These are a few things that have made the journey a little bit easier for me:

Change context

The demons are strongest when you compare yourself to others who seem to have it all figured out. They’re climbing the ranks and making progress, maybe getting an advanced degree, living in New York or San Francisco, where the heights of achievement reach to the sky. You have classmates whom you feel you’re just as good as.
Then you spend time reconnecting with someone you grew up with, and you get a completely different perspective. Or you spend time on a hike in the country, and it all seems grossly irrelevant. Or, you extract yourself to a new place—say Detroit, or New Orleans, or Baltimore—where you’re exposed to people who wouldn’t understand the distinctions between you and your classmates anyway.

Have a set of people you’re always honest with

It’s tempting to put a brave face forward when you talk to people, especially if you’re in hustle mode. But sometimes letting someone in on your struggle allows you to form a much more meaningful connection with them. Particularly if, as is the case 95% of the time, others are going through similar things.
Trust me when I say that people who seem to have it great have their own struggles.
There are some people that value you for you, not what you can do for them. Identify the people you can keep it real with, and make the most of them.

Family

My parents were concerned and unhappy when I left law. They didn’t talk too much about me to their friends—and I think they still told people I was a lawyer.
Eventually though, they came around. Parents will, most of the time, get on board with your choices if they see that you’re committed to them and willing to work hard. It’s particularly true if you make time for them, and they feel like you’re becoming a decent person. (Hopefully this is the case more often than not.) As much as they want to be able to talk about you, they want a good relationship with you even more.
Keep working on them, and don’t give up.

Value yourself for things that don’t appear on your resume

We’re all much more than a list of achievements. It’s the things we do in our personal lives that make us who we are.
I’ve been to dozens of weddings in the past 10 years (including my own), and have heard countless stories about people from their friends and loved ones. I’d say between zero and 1% of those stories took place in an office.
What we do with our working lives is important. But not every day (or week, or month) is intended to move the ball forward. Sometimes we’re just cooking, or writing our cousins, or putting together a collage that only one person will see. Those days are important too.

Find something to believe in

The single biggest thing you can do to feel good about your direction in life is to find the right opportunity, one in which you’re building toward something. As Graham Weston, the co-founder of Rackspace, put it, “What we all want from work is to be valued members of a winning team on an inspiring mission.”
This is much easier said than done. Quality opportunities that lead to a better sense of self are vastly outnumbered by positions that require significant compromise. Often, you’re in an environment that develops you in certain ways, but isn’t a long-term fit.
It’s always a tough balance—no job is going to be perfect. But be positive and keep pushing in the right direction. By the fourth or fifth job or company, you’ll have a much better sense of where you’ll best be able to develop and contribute. Maybe you’ll even start your own thing.

Lead and be led

Early on, you think that leadership comes from seniority. But it’s actually just an activity, and something you can do at any point.
Even as you’re trying to make your manager happy, find something that you can be in charge of and run with it. It can be something at work, like a committee or activity. It can be modest and personal, like a book club or pick-up basketball game. It can be a volunteer opportunity for a local non-profit. It can be a side business or project. It doesn’t need to be big—it just needs to be yours.
You’ll find that being in charge forces you to use different muscles and capacities than is the case in other environments. At West Point, they ask cadets to lead and report to a different cadet each year. That way, by the time they graduate, they’ll have a range of different leadership experiences to draw on.
I started a party business while I was working at the healthcare software company. It turned out to be a great experience. I also taught the GMAT part-time. And that morphed into my career for five-plus years.

Mind yourself

What if I told you that you could jump into someone else’s head and experience any point in time in human history? And learn literally from the smartest people who ever lived? That’s sort of what reading is like. It’s a context-switch in its own right. You can learn about business today from Jim Collins, or Sheryl Sandberg, or Eric Ries. You can read about the life and times of Steve Jobs, or Tina Fey, or Abe Lincoln. You can get a different take on life and the world with Murakami, or Kundera, or Woolf. You can grapple with ideas from some of the best thinkers in history. Books impact your mind like a boulder in a pond. Then the boulder stays there.
Putting your body in motion is just as important. Exercise relieves stress and helps you stay vital. Countless studies have shown it’s just about the best thing you can do for your long-term wellbeing. On a bad day, you can always say to yourself, “Well, if I accomplished nothing else, at least I went to the gym, or to the yoga studio, or for a run.”
The struggles are different and achievement means different things as time passes. The demons evolve as you grow. You can’t outpace them – but you can weaken them and make them harder to hear.
>>Check out more posts by Andrew Yang here

The Innovation Fund is a four-week crowdfunding competition that gives VFA Fellows the opportunity to launch their business ideas and projects. Nine Fellow-led teams are off to the races sharing their new ventures with the world and hustling to raise as much money as possible on Indiegogo between now and March 16th. 
Molly Adair is a 2014 Venture for America fellow working as a graphic designer in Providence, RI. She wants to help other people keep in touch by building an automated life update system, KIT. Check out the IndieGoGo page, as part of the VFA Innovation Fund challenge, and help make KIT a reality.

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“Let’s catch up soon!”
We’ve all said it before and we’ll all say it again. In passing, it’s easy to suggest; you run into a former classmate on the street and leave the brief conversation with the ephemeral line and loose promise of reconnecting. You may also be guilty of the “let’s link up sometime” or the non-descript parting, “keep in touch!”
At the time, we usually mean it. Social media and technology have supposedly made it easier to stay connected through email, Facebook, and the myriad of video chatting options. But so quickly are these intentions lost in the routine of the everyday — when you’ve spent two minutes flipping through a friend’s recent photo album on Facebook, you’re less likely to schedule a catch-up phone call. We’re more connected, but we struggle to stay involved in each other’s lives.
This problem is especially relevant right out of college. I graduated last May and parted ways with a group of close friends. We had been an integral part of each other’s lives since orientation – barely a day went by where I didn’t see someone from this friend group, which we lovingly dubbed the “Barrett fam” (after our freshman hall). So by the time September rolled around and I realized I knew nothing about what the Barrett fam had been up to that summer, I decided something needed to change.
Inspired by a friend, I started weekly life updates with the Barrett fam. Each week, one person sends an email to the whole group detailing what’s been happening in their life. Usually these updates contain the basic details – I’m in Providence, working for a startup, I’m not prepared for the New England weather – but it also gives people the chance to open up about what’s going on in their lives behind the scenes. I’ve been able to connect with friends going through similar post-grad struggles – even consoled someone who’s just plain sick of the Tinder dating scene.
These life updates give us a reason to connect each week, even if it’s just to say “hey, thanks for writing!” They allow us to stay involved in each other’s lives with the lowest form of commitment. Sending one email every few months is not at all threatening and getting a message from a friend every Sunday evening makes for a pleasant end to the week. But an unforeseen issue with these life updates was the burden of coordinating them; what I thought would be an easy task quickly turned into a 6-month-long coordination nightmare. I’m constantly forgetting to email reminders out and have to hop from Google doc to Excel spreadsheet to Word doc to orchestrate all the information.
There had to be a better way. Without any platforms designed for this purpose on the market, I realized I would have to build a better way. Now I’m trying to build KIT – an easy way to keep in touch with friends.
The chances that the whole Barrett fam will live in the same building again, and thus the odds that we’ll be able to recreate our experiences from college, are slim to none. Yet weekly updates keep that supportive network of friends going long after graduation. I hope that by building KIT, my funny little college family and many other friend groups will be able to keep up that supportive network for years to come.
Plus, now I can say “let’s catch up soon!” and actually mean it.
 

By Mugha Eltigani

 
Muhga Eltigani is the founder of NaturAll Club, a subscription-based service for all natural hair care products. In the post below, she outlines three ways to “stop making excuses and start a business” and how they empowered her to start NaturAll. You can support Muhga and NaturAll Club by checking out her Indiegogo page here!

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I had a problem. There were too many hair products in my cabinet and none of them were working for me.  So I challenged myself to make my own hair products for six months and documented it on YouTube.  Despite the validation of 29,000 subscribers also looking for convenient and consistent natural hair care, I hesitated to launch the business that offered the solution.
Many factors can deter you from starting a venture.  So I rounded up the top three natural ingredients that helped me stop making excuses and start my business, NaturAll Club.

1. Surround yourself with like-minded people.

Work with an existing startup. Take online classes.  Follow some of your favorite business blogs and entrepreneurs to get inspiration, advice and tips.  If you can’t find inspiration around you, create a community like I did.
Tristan Walker is one of my greatest motivators and I have never met him.  But my best support has come from my fellowship with Venture For America.  They encouraged me to take chances and create opportunities for myself and others.

2. Give yourself a deadline.

Throw yourself a launch party. Sign up for a competition.  Do a Startup Weekend–and build a company in 54 hours.  If you’re anything like me, you need deadlines and pressure to get the adrenaline going.
I based my startup building around the VFA Innovation Fund, which gave me a deadline to launch a crowdfunding campaign and make my business a reality. The campaign helped me tell others and keep myself accountable and motivated.

3. Don’t let funding be a deterrent.

Do everything possible to build your business before spending money.
Do research.  Study.  Experiment.  Build your startup’s social media.  Learn from leading experts. Send surveys to potential consumers. Build your own website.  Work until the only thing that is stopping you from scaling, is money.  When you reach that point, it will be easier to find the resources because you have already laid the groundwork.
After applying these tips I was able to form NaturAll Club, a monthly subscription-based service delivering all natural hair care products for your best and healthiest hair.  As I strive be the leader in natural hair care products, I build every new aspect of NaturAll Club from these three blocks.  I am so excited to see where this journey will take me and what I learn from every step.
The enemy of starting any business is excuses.  Big ideas await.  Are you ready?

The Innovation Fund is a four-week crowdfunding competition that gives VFA Fellows the opportunity to launch their business ideas and projects. Nine Fellow-led teams will be competing to raise as much money as possible between now and March 16th on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. 
Charlie Molthrop and Labib Rahman have teamed up to create Haikoops, a Twitter bot that captures anytime someone accidentally tweets a Haiku, and with your help, a new book to share these tweet-poems with the world. Read more about their project below and visit their Indiegogo page if you’d like to support them! 

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By Charlie Molthrop and Labib Rahman
In April of 2013, the New York Times launched Times Haiku, an algorithm-driven Tumblr that scans “All the News That’s Fit to Print” for sentences that conform to the gradeschool definition of the haiku: five syllables, then seven, then five. It turns out that if a haiku is easy enough for a 1st grader to identify, it’s not too hard for a computer either.
As Jacob Harris, the Times’ senior software architect, readily admits on the blog’s about page: “Not every haiku our computer finds is a good one,” so the final haikus are hand-picked by Times staff. Even bound by the syntax of the Times’ AP-style monotone, the haikus are imbued with a certain curious gravitas, like this one from an article about desk ornaments:

 
 
 
 
 
 
The accidental haikus of twitter are of a slightly different breed. Perhaps most obviously, they aren’t taken out of context. Tweets are crafted to stand alone from the start. Unlike the haikus of the New York Times, Twitter’s accidental haikus (and yes they’re almost all inadvertent) are often the opposite of newsworthy–made to be read once (or never) and soon forgotten. But it’s the inconsequence of the tweet that can make it a better subject of the internet’s poetic curiosity. There’s no filter between the author and their audience, and the ephemera of a tweet often encourages the transcription of a half-considered musing:

@_MariamRose #haikoops: “Accidentally following someone is the most annoying thing”
— haikoops (@haikoops) February 11, 2015

@_lucasbosley #haikoops: “Vegan gangster rap be like “spending all of my cheese on broccoli”” — haikoops (@haikoops) February 11, 2015

The internet has a notoriously short attention span. @haikoops, the twitter bot we created to recognize twitter’s accidental haikus, invites users to take one final look back at their last tweet before it fades off into the sunset (and the Library of Congress).

“@haikoops: @gnarleh #haikoops: “I dont want to think about my future, I want to ride my skateboard”” im a poet, tight
— kyle (@gnarleh) January 29, 2015

.@haikoops bahahah I’m so entertained that you found this unintentional haiku of mine. I love you. — the navigator (@theREIGNYseason) February 11, 2015

Coding is laborious. When you’ve spent hundreds of hours on a series of letters and numbers that reads other letters and numbers in order to find certain other letters and numbers, you can’t help but try to explain to yourself why you’re doing it. Maybe there’s something about being able to tell someone they made something cool just by being themselves. Maybe there’s a part of all of us that wants to celebrate mundanity rather than scorn it because that’s what most of life is. Maybe there’s an inherent beauty to our construction of language that brings balance and zen to the digital subconscious.

@trvshy #haikoopsthebook: “DENIM ON DENIM ON DENIM ON DENIM ON DENIM ON DENIM”
— haikoops (@haikoops) February 15, 2015

Maybe.
@haikoops was created by Charlie Molthrop and Labib Rahman. Their unofficial book of Twitter’s best accidental haikus can be funded here. They hope to split the profits with the poets who didn’t know it.

2012 Fellow Scott Lowe hails from Muskogee, Oklahoma and attended the University of Oklahoma, where he earned a degree in Engineering Physics. While in Detroit for his fellowship, Scott split his time between working at Chalkfly and renovating an abandoned mansion in order to transform it into a co-working and living space for future VFA Fellows. The project led him and fellow Fellows Max Nussenbaum and Tim Dingman to launch Castle, a property management software platform that has raised $100k since their launch. When Scott’s not banging out code into the late hours of the night, you can usually find him shredding his guitar (he’s pretty awesome) or diving into a new book.
Name: Scott Lowe
School: University of Oklahoma ’12
Fellow Class: 2012
City: Detroit
Where you worked with VFA: Chalkfly
Where are you now? Working full-time on my own company, Castle, with fellow Fellows Max Nussenbaum and Tim Dingman

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Graduation was just around the corner, and VFA was my next step. It was the spring of 2012, and despite my background in physics and computer science, I had zero interest in writing code for a startup. Coding was a hobby I was really passionate about, and I was afraid that doing it for a living would ruin all the fun. Plus, I signed up for VFA to learn how to build businesses, not websites, and I was extremely leery of being pigeon-holed as a developer.
Still, nine months into VFA I ditched the title “Business Analyst” for “Software Engineer” and fully embraced my role.
Being a developer at a startup shattered my expectations in two major ways:

1. Being a developer at a startup didn’t actually limit my responsibilities.

Rather than boxing me into software development, the title change resulted in a huge expansion of my responsibilities. By leveraging my problem solving talent, I skyrocketed my value-add to the company which earned me the latitude to contribute to nearly every arm of the business, from digital marketing to recruiting. Being in the trenches and working on the many problems that you inevitably encounter while building a startup only fueled my passion for coding.

2. The lessons I learned were more applicable than I ever expected.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about writing code at a startup is just how applicable the lessons learned actually are. I wrote some pretty cool software in college, but that all pales in comparison to the sense of pride I felt every time I solved an actual customer’s problem. Each new language or library learned is like another tool on the toolbelt, and over time you learn how to pick the right tools for the job, allowing you to get more done with less time and less effort.
Fast forward two-and-a-half years, and my VFA fellowship has come to an end. I’d been restoring a house with a few other Detroit Fellows, and we decided to take what we learned from the house and our combined experience at startups and start our own.
Now, along with my co-founders Max Nussenbaum and Tim Dingman, I’m applying what I learned to building Castle,  a real estate tech startup that takes the work out of being a landlord. Sure I was apprehensive and anxious when deciding whether to dive in to building a business of my own– but in the end, I went for it. Despite all my anxiety and apprehension, I decided to dive in because VFA taught me that there’s no better way to learn than by building.

2013 Fellow Mike Wilner grew up in Baltimore and attended Washington & Lee University where he studied Math and Business, played two seasons of Varsity Basketball (led the team in fouls-per-minute…seriously), and held it down as the Treasurer of his fraternity. After spending his fellowship at Detroit startup BoostUp wearing every figurative “hat” you can imagine, he’s now teamed up with another VFA Fellow, Taylor Sandali, to launch Compass— a service that connects small businesses with technology resources and expertise. 

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Name: Mike Wilner
School: Washington & Lee University ’13
Fellow Class: 2013
City: Detroit
Where you worked with VFA: BoostUp
Where are you now? Working part time for a company called SocialProof while continuing to build my company, Compass
About 8 months into our VFA fellowship, Taylor Sundali and I encountered a problem we wanted to solve: we wanted to hold an event in Detroit, but realized how difficult it was to accurately gauge how many people would actually attend a social gathering since traditional RSVP’s don’t hold the weight they used to. So, we sought to create an app for event organizing that used a crowdsourced method, in which invitees play a larger role in the event’s fruition, resulting in a stronger sense of commitment. We called it Gather.
For the next few months, we started working together on some lean experiments to learn more about the problem we were trying to solve. Then, we did a lean experiment that worked exactly as we intended, and we effortlessly organized a pop-up social gathering with over 40 people.
This was a great step for us, and we figured we had enough product insight to create a product that people could use, and we were pumped.
Then at my sisters graduation the next week, my parents, both of which are small business owners, sat me down for 30 minutes to talk through some of the digital marketing aspects of their businesses. They asked questions about social media, web design, suspect advice they’d received from self-proclaimed experts, and more.
In about a half hour, I was able to correct some poor advice they were given, gave them a clear direction with the things that were worth their time, and offered to create a website for my dad with Squarespace, which took me a few hours. All of the advice and services I provided for my parents were things that I’d taken for granted–I’d never thought of these things as proprietary, marketable skills.
Then I thought, what if we could get more people like me (digital natives/VFA Fellows) to provide some of these services for underserved small businesses whose most valuable resources are time and money?
When I got back to Detroit, Taylor and I had a meeting. I explained this idea to him, he came up with the name Compass, and we decided to begin working on Compass instead of Gather.
Coincidentally, the VFA Innovation Fund was right around the corner, which prompted another decision. While some of our friends knew we had been working on Gather, it was still a private side project. A crowdfunding campaign, however, would be very public. We would have to put our idea out there for everyone to see–something I’d never done before.
It was not an easy decision to commit to the innovation fund. Looking back, that decision was not a big deal, but at the time, it felt like the biggest risk I’d taken in a while. Fortunately, Taylor, a few fellows, the VFA team, and my family helped me work through my apprehensions and helped me realize it was a risk worth taking.
So we jumped in with both feet to the innovation fund with nothing but an idea. In the two weeks that followed, we created a logo, a brand, a script for our crowdfunding video, the video itself, a website, and a crowdfunding campaign.
In the 5 weeks of the crowdfunding campaign, we were forced to sell our services to small businesses before we even knew how we would fulfill them: logo creation, website creation, and running google adwords campaigns.
We were able to raise $7,213. More importantly, through our countless conversations with small businesses, friends, family, and anyone else who would listen, we validate our idea even more, realized that we needed to focus on just one service to start (websites), and acquired our first customers.
Since then, we’ve created 10 websites for our customers, learned the ins and outs of the digital marketing landscape, have been accepted into the VFA Accelerator, spoken to VCs, and have discovered some juicy insights that makes Taylor and I really excited to go all-in on Compass.
It’s been a great journey already, and aside from the Compass-specific lessons I’ve learned, the journey has taught me a few valuable lessons that I’ll take with me no matter what the situation is:

It’s important to understand sunk costs.

It would have been a huge mistake to continue with Gather despite the the opportunity that presented itself with Compass. Instead, we just thought about what the right next move was. We deemed Gather a sunk costs, extracted all of the value we could out of it, and moved on with Compass. In our first six months with Compass, we made assumptions and spent a lot of time working on things that were completely wrong. It’s been really valuable to not get too attached to the work we’ve put into certain things, as it’s allowed us to iterate, learn, and improve rapidly. 

The idea and team are important, but how the team works together is even more important.

One of the valuable things we extracted from Gather was the way Taylor and I learned how to work together. We were able to hit the ground running, using some of the same workflows and processes that we’d developed with Gather. While most of Gather was a sunk costs, we carried our teamwork along with some other lessons we learned, over to Compass.

You can learn to work together with someone.

At first, Taylor and I were apprehensive about working together because we thought our skillsets were too identical. However, through transparent peer-feedback sessions and not being afraid to talk candidly about it, we’ve learned ways that we’re very different, and have learned how to compliment each other extremely well.

Big risks are not made at once–they’re made over series of smaller, manageable risks.

The thought of going full-time on Compass doesn’t seem like a huge risk right now–it just makes sense. That’s because the risk involved in taking such a leap has been distributed over series of smaller risks over the past few months–the innovation fund, calling customers, charging customers for services that we were still figuring out, and more. Huge leaps of faith are usually glorified in the media, but often if you look closer, you’ll see smaller risks that are taken because they make sense at the time.

If you surround yourself with good people that are aligned with your values, they’ll help point you in the right direction.

When I wasn’t sure about the innovation fund, I was surrounded by people who had aligned values and understood a lot about me. When I turned to them for guidance, they set me straight.

Building your idea publicly is a great way to quickly materialize an idea.

When Taylor and I decided to work on Compass, it would have taken a lot longer to get it off the ground if we were building it privately, on our own time. Instead, the crowdfunding campaign had deadlines, and forced us to make things ready for public eye.

You only have to be ready for tomorrow.

Taylor and I have grown tremendously over the past 6 months. When Compass was just an idea, I didn’t feel ready to sell partnerships, convince small businesses to trust us with their online presence, or pitch VCs, yet here I am. Still, despite our personal growth over the past 6 months, I think about things that we’re going to have to do in the next 12 months (raise capital, build a team, manage dozens of projects at once), and I don’t feel 100% ready, but that’s ok. We just need to be ready for tomorrow, then the next day, and then the next day. If we continue to be humble, learn as much as we can, and meet the next day’s challenges, we’ll be ready for those daunting things when we wake up to them.
“Learning by doing” only works if you pay attention to what you’re learning. While Taylor and I have been moving fast through this journey, we take time to digest what we’re learning, which typically happens through posts like these. Reflecting on what you’re learning and noticing how you’re growing is really important for young, inexperienced founders like ourselves. As Compass grows, we need to grow with it. Rome wasn’t built in a day, Compass won’t be built in a day, and we as founders will not be built in a day.

A year ago today, our Founder & CEO, Andrew Yang, added author to his already impressive list of accomplishments by publishing “Smart People Should Build Things.” It’s been such an exciting journey for Andrew (and all of us!) since last February and wanted to take today to thank all the supporters who have made the past year possible! If you feel like reminiscing (Happy Throwback Thursday!), we republished one of the first excerpts we posted this time last year. Want your very own copy? Check out www.smartpeopleshouldbuildthings.com.

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Smart People Should Build Things

Take me, for instance. I wasn’t very enterprising when I graduated from Brown in 1996. I had a general desire to be smart, accomplished, and successful—whatever that meant. So I went to law school and became a corporate attorney in New York. I figured out I was in the wrong place after a number of months working at the law firm. I left in less than a year and cofounded a dot-com company, Stargiving, which helped raise money for celebrity-affiliated nonprofits. It was extraordinarily difficult. My company failed spectacularly, but I recovered. I went to work for a mobile software company, Crisp Wireless, and then a health care software company, MMF Systems, over the next five years, eventually becoming the CEO of a test-prep company, Manhattan GMAT, in 2006.
I spent five years running Manhattan GMAT, helping young people get into business school. I taught our corporate classes of investment banking analysts and consultants at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Company, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Deloitte, as well as hundreds of individual students over the years. Some were exactly where they wanted to be. But there seemed to be just as many top-notch young people who wondered why they didn’t like their jobs more. They sought a higher sense of engagement with their work and their careers. Sometimes they would put words to what they were looking for; they’d say they wanted “something entrepreneurial” or “to be really excited about something.”
By the time my company was acquired by Kaplan and its parent, the Washington Post Company, in 2009, I knew a few things. I knew that there were promising startups and growth companies all over the country that needed talent to expand and thrive. I knew firsthand that there was an army of talented, ambitious, somewhat directionless young people who’d love to work for a startup. And I knew that if we could connect these two groups, we’d help everyone: the individuals, the companies, cities and communities around the country, the economy, and society as a whole.
When I was younger, I subscribed to a general view of our educational system that goes something like this: If you study hard and do well in high school, you’ll get into a good college. Where you go to college is very important. Then, if you do well in college, perhaps you’ll go on to law school or med school, or maybe academia if you’re an intellectual sort. In any case, if you’re smart and work hard, you’ll wind up with a good job.
That “good job,” in this scenario, is a job that requires a lot of complex analytical thinking and pays well, like investment banking or management consulting. If a student takes a professional route, becoming a lawyer, doctor, accountant, or dentist, he or she will need additional years of special training to develop professional skills and judgment—all very attractive to high achievers.
This is our system of training and employment, and it functions very well. Smart, hardworking kids go to good schools and get trained for good jobs. The job market operates with great efficiency, and that is a big reason why our economy is so successful.
There’s another view of the current system, though—that it’s a mess. Ambitious college students have no real idea what to do upon graduation, but they’re trained to seek the “next level.” Many apply to law school, grad school, or even medical school because of a vague notion of status and progress rather than a genuine desire or natural fit. Those who try to do something independently often find themselves frustrated by their lack of rapid advancement, and so default to a more structured path of law school, business school, or graduate school. The concentration in professional services leads our national university graduates to congregate in a handful of metropolitan areas—primarily New York City, Silicon Valley, Boston, and Washington, DC. Those who become bankers or consultants are highly paid and heavily socialized, yet many become disaffected due to a lack of purpose an unsustainable lifestyle, and some simply discover they don’t enjoy their roles. We train thousands more lawyers each year than legal jobs exist for, and hundreds more academics than there are academic jobs. Each path throws off waves of refugees who are often at a loss as to what to do with themselves, only at that point they’re in their late twenties, possibly in debt or used to an expensive lifestyle, and trained to do something narrow and specific.
Meanwhile, massive needs in other sectors are not being met. American companies need smart people who can manage, operate, innovate, and improve them. And startups and early-stage growth companies are in desperate need of talent in order to create jobs and drive economic progress. The metropolitan areas of Detroit, New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Las Vegas account for over $1 trillion of US gross domestic product and represent a vastly diverse range of industries. The trajectory of the young growth companies in these cities and others like them will determine the direction of our economy. Detroit alone is our twelfth largest metro region, with over 3.6 million people. Its post-bankruptcy renewal is one of the great projects of this age. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a giant recruitment arm to make the case on college campuses.
Our identification and distribution of talent in the United States has gone from being a historic strength to a critical weakness. We’ve let the market dictate what our smart kids do, and they’re being systematically funneled into obvious, structured paths that don’t serve them or the economy terribly well.
This book makes a basic argument. If year after year we send our top people to financial services, management consulting, and law schools, we’ll wind up with the pattern we’re already seeing: layers of highly paid professionals working astride faltering companies and industries. But if we send them to startups, we’ll get something else. Early-stage companies in energy, retail, biotech, consumer products, health care, transportation, software, media, education, and other industries would have a better chance of innovating and creating value. Even allowing for a certain amount of failure, we’d create hundreds of new companies and tens of thousands of new jobs over time. Our economy and our country would be better off. Our communities’ tax bases would go up, shoring up our ability to pay for schools and long-term development. We’d restore our culture of achievement to include value creation, risk and reward, and the common good. By solving this one problem, we solve many other problems at the same time.

Want to pick up a copy for yourself? Make it happen here.