We are excited to present our very first interview with a VFA Fellow on the Venture for America Podcast! This week Jeremy talks to Brian Rudolph, Co-Founder and CEO of Banza, a chickpea pasta company aiming to do for pasta what Chobani did for greek yogurt. In this interview Brian shares the trials and tribulations of perfecting a difficult recipe, scaling to service hundreds of grocery stores around the country, convincing his older brother to leave a stable job in private equity to join the company, and what is feels like to be the first VFA Fellow to hire another Fellow.

Click here to listen

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We’re back in one of our favorite cities (hey Providence!), and VFA Training Camp is officially underway. The 2015 class is rolling deep this year, with 122 top-notch Fellows who are more than up to the challenge of our 5-week startup bootcamp. Week 1 was jam packed with guest speakers, world-class trainers, and high-intensity team challenges– and the Fellows proved they’re not here to mess around (except, of course, when a team challenge involves choreographed song and dance). Check out our recap video here and a breakdown of week 1 below!
https://vimeo.com/132108492

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We kicked off the week with opening remarks by our Founder and CEO, Andrew Yang, and RI Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who both set an inspiring tone for the summer ahead. The week continued with a website redesign challenge, coding bootcamps, UI/UX training, and a series of stimulating guest lectures. And in the rare times they weren’t working away, the Fellows could be found playing pickup basketball, venturing down paths of poison ivy during ill-fated nature walks, or getting serious about their sugar cravings at our annual ice cream social. It was a “work hard, play a little, and then work a lot more” type of week.

The Trainings

In 2 days time, the Fellows tackled both front and back end development, gaining the skills and confidence needed to design and build a website from scratch; later in the week, they dove into the soft skills. We heard from:

• Flatiron School, who ran a serious coding training that required 20-30 hours of pre-work from our more technical Fellows
• Fellow-founded company Compass, who went through the ins and outs of using WordPress, Squarespace, and other tools for non-coders to create websites
• UI/UX expert Jennifer Smith, who set the Fellows on a path to creating user-friendly, and beautifully designed websites

• Emotional Intelligence expert Jarik Conrad taught us that there’s an objective science to looking inward and it’s a critical one to master
• Courtney Emerson, founder of All in Together, built on Jarik’s presentation and offered some concrete tips on how to create and manage a diverse company culture
• And finally, Sheri Smith of Indigo Project walked 150 of us through the results of her rigorous personality assessment (and there were definitely a few “a-ha” moments there)

The Challenge

If you can’t tell, we love learning around here, but we think it’s even better when learning is applied to solving real-world problems. That’s why we gave our 21 Fellow teams 72 hours to redesign and build the website of one of three Fellow-founded companies – Banza, Zest Tea, and NaturAll Club. They put the hard and soft skills accumulated throughout the week to work building impressive levels of team chemistry and even a few nearly flawless websites.

The Winner

After 70+ hours of work and more trips to Starbucks than anyone can remember, Team Madrone emerged as the winner of the 2015 Website Challenge. Check out their work and our other winners below!

• Banza (and overall winner*): Madrone – Cassie Coravos, Dennis Shih, Nick Baker, Amanda Tien, Tia Davis, Kasim Ahmad
• NaturAll Club: Ventureholics – Niki Chimberg, Dutch Waanders, Rafael De Armas, Christopher Kontes, Sophie Janaskie, Vanessa Paige
• Zest Tea: Tune Squad – Adele Zhang, Vinay Seshachellam, Jack Docal, Andrew Harris, Dextina Booker, Jesse Golomb

We know you want to follow along, so don’t forget to check us out on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, or our #vfabootcamp live feed!
 

Listen to the most recent episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, a play.it original in collaboration with CBS!

This week, host Jeremy Shinewald sits down with Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder of Gilt Groupe and CEO of Glamsquad, a New York City-based beauty provider that delivers professional and affordable hair, makeup and nail services to customers’ apartments, offices, hotels — wherever a blowout is needed. It’s like Seamless for looking really, really good.
Alexandra describes the early days at Gilt as risky, challenging, exhausting — and totally exhilarating. The co-founders “were like superheroes,” full of passion and a seemingly boundless energy for the scrappy work that needed to be done. As hard as it is to imagine now, Alexandra and her team initially struggled to find companies willing to sell their merchandise through Gilt. But when the economy took a nose dive in 2008, things looked up: suddenly, all kinds of popular designers found themselves with hundreds of thousands of dollars in merchandise that couldn’t be sold full-price. Seven years of rampant success later, Alexandra left for a new challenge: developing Glamsquad — a company she already invested in (and whose services she used) — into a need-to-have for the busy women of NYC.
Recounting lights off in fashion show rooms and suspecting these designers literally couldn’t pay their electric bills. How the financial crisis gave Gilt the circumstances it needed to grow. The value of Harvard business school, her appetite for risk, being okay with failure, what’s the worst case scenario, ignoring naysayers,
Download the latest episode to hear Alexandra talk about growing a business in an on-demand economy, hoping for the unexpected, tuning out the naysayers, and why it makes sense that Glamsquad’s Series A investor was a woman.
 

Interview with Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Co-Founder of Gilt Groupe and CEO of Glamsquad. In this episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, Jeremy interviews Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Co-Founder of Gilt Groupe and current CEO of Glamsquad, on-demand, app-based beauty provider delivering professional and affordable hair, makeup and nails (currently available in NYC only) services to your home, office, hotel, or wherever you may be. Alexandra gives Jeremy the inside scoop on what she learned while building Gilt Groupe and what’s it’s like to be the matriarch of the “Glam Fam”.

Click here to listen.

Listen to the most recent episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, a play.it original in collaboration with CBS!

In this episode, host Jeremy Shinewald sits down with Scott Reich and Mike Winik, the co-founders of OurHarvest, a startup that works with local farms to bring fresh food directly to consumers at affordable prices. Scott and Mike had known that they wanted to start something together since their days as college roommates. So when the right idea came along, they left their successful corporate careers—in law and investment banking, respectively—to pursue a much more uncertain (but much more rewarding) path. OurHarvest aims to blend the experience of a farmer’s market with the convenience of shopping online—and in New York City, it’s made access to healthy, straight-from-the-farm food even more convenient, rolling out a delivery service powered by Uber. But it’s about more than just cutting out the middlemen. Scott and Mike are invested in fighting food insecurity—the lack of access to enough food for an active, healthy life—a problem that impacts nearly 1 in 6 Americans. For every purchase over $25, OurHarvest donates a meal to a local food bank.
Download the latest episode to hear the Mike and Scott discuss growing OurHarvest, the 24/7 reality of working with fresh food, developing partnerships with established brands like Equinox and Uber—and trading stable, corporate careers for “being hugged by farmers every day.”

Originally published on entrepreneur.com

T hree of Venture for America’s fellows — Mike Wilner, Taylor Sundali, and Matt Fulton — noticed that over 50 percent of small businesses don’t have a website, and of those that do, over 90 percent aren’t optimized for mobile visitors. So, they started a company, Compass, to address this.
I believe that Compass is going to become a multi-million dollar business in the coming years.
“Wait,” you’re thinking, “a website company is a good opportunity? Isn’t it 2015?” Or maybe you’re asking, “How the heck do so many businesses not have websites? Isn’t that the first thing you’d do nowadays?” Especially now that there are so many do-it-yourself services like Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly.
Understanding the answers to these questions requires some context. I’m going to start close to home, with my 67-year old Mom. She’s an artist and she recently wanted to build a website to display her paintings and sell prints. So she called me, her (theoretically) tech-savvy 40-year old son who’s an entrepreneur and asked for my help.
What did I do?
I didn’t build her a website – I didn’t want to sit there and figure out Squarespace and produce something she wouldn’t like anyway.
I didn’t recommend her to an agency. I knew she didn’t want to spend much money and they generally cost at least $5k.
Instead, I thought to myself, “Hmm, what human beings do I know that build websites that won’t rip my Mom off?”
The truth is that most independent businesspeople are in their thirties or older, and most of those people don’t have the time to figure out how to build a website on their own. The proportion of people who start trying to build a website on Wix and actually finish is only 2%. That means 98% of people give it a whirl and quit. That’s a lot of unbuilt websites and a lot of businesses that need them.
I could have told my Mom to go to a freelance platform like Elance, Upwork, or 99designs. But these platforms require you to submit specs, vet submissions, decide on pricing, provide content, etc. It’s a whole project management exercise. I would have been punting my Mom into a maw of complexity.
So how does Compass surmount these difficulties? They build customized websites for $800 – $1,800 and have a network of highly curated freelancers (many of whom are Venture for America Fellows). They have a well-designed process to get the info they need from the business owner so that they can deliver a quality product quickly and reliably. Their freelancers are paid $40+ an hour and don’t have to do all of the meta-work that makes this kind of thing painful for creatives (sell, negotiate, educate, gather content and info, etc.). Freelancers generally want as friction-free an engagement as possible. Compass smooths out the friction.
The market is enormous – $12 billion a year is spent by small businesses on web services each year. It’s not just websites, but search engine optimization, email marketing, social media, analytics and everything else a small business would want to do online.
So many companies today are saying “here are the tools, we’ve made it easier than ever (for you to do)!” It’s easy to see why that’s the approach. You can go big and keep your costs down by minimizing the services component.
But providing better tools is not going to solve this particular problem. The vast majority of small business owners want nothing to do with figuring out a website. They are neck-deep in their business trying to keep it going. If they’re a caterer they’re in a kitchen, shopping for supplies, sending thank-you notes, etc. If they’re a landscaper they’re hiring people, mowing lawns, maintaining equipment, etc. They’re chiropractors, chefs, musicians, physical therapists, plumbers, contractors and everything else under the sun.
They’re time-starved and trying to move things off their plate. The key isn’t providing better tools; instead it’s accessibility, ease, convenience, process and, above all, service.
I ran an education company that grew to become #1 in the U.S. in its category. Theoretically, our customers COULD have gone out and taxonomized all of the primary materials or found a freelance tutor, and our Instructors could have hung their own shingles and tried to attract students. But we made things accessible and easy by curating the best Instructors, packaging the materials in a digestible form and format, and delivering a high-quality service. That company grew to tens in millions in revenue and still continues to grow to this day (yes, even today when educational content is theoretically ‘free’ online and ubiquitous. It turns out the completion rate for open online courses is only about 4%).
We never raised any money – investors probably wouldn’t have liked the business model anyway. Too many people involved.
There’s a lesson here for entrepreneurs looking for opportunities – it’s true that technology is transforming industries and enabling unprecedented levels of both reach and access. It’s getting better all of the time. But each new toolset or means of communication requires another investment on the part of businesses and individuals that may not be in position to make them. When people approach a transaction or task they don’t necessarily want to equip themselves or become experts. There’s a reason that headhunters still thrive even though there’s LinkedIn, real estate brokers still make money even though there’s Zillow, etc. If you go deep into a problem, you’ll find most all of the time that there are yet more problems to be solved from the ground up. Technology can create needs even as it addresses them. Sometimes solving the base problems requires a lot of work – which is where the opportunity lies.
>>Check out more posts by Andrew Yang here

In this episode, Jeremy Shinewald sits down with Scott Reich and Mike Winik, childhood friends and Co-Founders of OurHarvest, a company that works with local farms to bring fresh food directly to consumers at an affordable price. The duo discuss the inception of OurHarvest, the 24/7 reality of working with fresh food, doing their part to eliminate food insecurity, developing partnerships with established brands like Equinox and Uber—and trading corporate jobs “for being hugged by farmers every day.”

Click here to listen

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Mike Tarullo is SVP of Corporate Development at Venture for America. Mike has ran and managed nearly every department at VFA and most recently has focused his efforts on helping Fellows build companies via our seed fund, the VFA Accelerator and Innovation Fund. 
Read on for his advice on how to effectively manage up and follow his thoughts on jobs, learning and startups on his blog “Outside the Echo Chamber“. 

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We’ve been told never to compromise in hiring. Everyone interprets that kind of statement differently (Google has mastered the dispensing of deceptively simple advice). The hiring philosophy of “no compromises” has spawned a bevy of posts that borrow the term “A-player” and fail to define it. (The term was popularized by Steve Jobs, who probably knew what he meant, and a legion of disciples, who probably didn’t.)
For the uninitiated, an A-player is top notch (the “A” refers to their grade as a human being) and they will hire other A-players because they, being singularly perfect, will identify, attract, and hire additional flawless beings to populate their workplace. Meanwhile, if you make compromises and hire B-players, they will (out of pettiness, incompetence, or lack of interpersonal appeal) go off and hire C-players, and pretty soon your org will be chock full of mediocrity. This is interesting and probably true, but in a vacuum, meaningless. It’s the old Lake Wobegon effect – everyone believes their team is above-average.

The A-player thing has become ubiquitous in startups, but based on a few years of observation, I’m not sure we know quite what it means. People are not so easily summed up into a tidy grade – you might be an A at piloting new initiatives, but a B- at taking constructive feedback (see? you’re bristling. calm down). Most people are a little spiky, and even those who are really good on the aggregate have significant room for improvement.
One caveat: the self-fulfilling prophecy. For anyone who’s played team sports, you might be familiar with the difference between a winning and a losing locker room. In a winning locker room, everyone seems to like each other, shares credit, and puts the team first. In a losing one, everyone’s pointing fingers and thinking only about themselves. Basically, if your company is doing great, everyone looks like an A player, and if it’s hard times, it’s a lot harder to hold it together. Thus, there’s a bit of chicken-and-egg when it comes to all of this.
That’s why, to me, being an A-player is about personal character, sound judgment, and mental agility; everything else is negotiable. People with those attributes will fit in on most any team. It’s the workplace equivalent of a basketball player who prefers wins over stats, takes high-percentage shots, and studies the opposing team before a game. You can’t go wrong with that type of person.
So how are we supposed to turn a resume and an interview into a sense of character, judgment and agility? Have ten interviews and build consensus? Create an elaborate rubric? Hire slow/fire fast AKA treat finding a new account manager like finding a soulmate? Totally give up and shoot from the hip?
Don’t be silly; this is the internet, we’ll just make a list! I’m including what I think you can compromise on, and how to gauge the things you can’t in an interview.

What can I compromise on?

SKILLS

As long as they can learn them – ask about past examples of learning a new skill on the job. Paying someone to mostly learn for a couple months is less painful than spending those months searching in vain.

PAST ROLES

Instead of screening only for people who held a similar title at a different organization (boring!), try to distill a job down to the personal attributes it requires and the kinds of problems they had to solve.

FIVE YEAR PLAN

You don’t know where you’ll be in five years, either.

What shouldn’t I compromise on?

ENTITLEMENT

Early signs of ego, expectations, and aloofness are bad. An effective team player knows what they’re capable of, and knows they’ll sometimes need to do rote tasks, even if only for the sake of learning how the team works, or building camaraderie. Don’t ask a leading question like “are you willing to do grunt work?” Instead, suggest one at a time a few things they might have to do – some cool, some less cool – and ask for their experience doing each.

COMMITMENT

The person has to clearly want to join your specific team and organization. Successful organizations often screw up here, hiring people who say, “I’m excited about your growth/this role/this cool office” and mistake that for being excited about the work you do. Beware job-hoppers, boilerplate cover letters, and people who think ping pong tables equal culture. When you interview someone, have a really detailed answer for “what does a typical day look like?” and see if they’re comfortable with how it sounds.

SELF-AWARENESS

Ask after past mistakes and difficult situations they’ve been in, and see if they blame others and exhibit negativity, or acknowledge responsibility and share lessons learned. Everyone has screwed up. If they can’t bring up examples, they’re going to do it on your watch. Typically, a more senior person has screwed up on a larger scale.

PARALLEL EXPERIENCE

You’re best served by finding someone who’s operated in an environment similar to yours, even if it’s not identical. Are you a startup? Best if they’ve worked in an unstructured environment with tight timelines (like, say, a political campaign). A smart person will draw these parallels in their cover letter.

SELF-INTEREST

This one’s a doozy. Everyone’s self-interested; you just have to figure out who’s going to be self-interested to the point of toxicity. Typically the signs of a self-interested person are either an ingratiating nature or an MBA. Just kidding, MBA’s!

PROCESSING SPEED

Sorry, no way around it. You need someone who can grasp concepts quickly and weigh multiple variables. Talk with them about a process or challenge that exists in your department and see how they dissect it and how quickly they pick up on the subtleties, plus whether they’re fun to work with to brainstorm a solution.
Easy, right?! Okay, so it’s still a bear to sort through all this stuff. Hiring well is the hardest thing to do at a startup. Dig in, treat it like your #1 priority, trust your gut feelings about someone’s character, and things will work out more often than not. To be fair, the A-player maxim gets it right in the end – it really does take an A player to hire another one. It’s the definition of an A-player that differs: we’re not out looking for Michael Jordan or Kobe; we’re looking for Mike Miller or Shane Battier, a person who does all the little-but-big things right and makes everyone around them better. The true A-player is the person who can figure out what your team needs, and has the capacity and desire to deliver it.

 

In the latest episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, Jeremy interviews Charlie Kroll, founding VFA Board Member, Co-Founder and President of Ellevest Financial and Founder and CEO of Andera, a venture-backed provider of customer acquisition solutions for the financial services industry, which he started from his dorm room at Brown University. Charlie brings us along on his journey from naive 22 year old founder struggling to make payroll, to profitable industry leader with hundreds of employees and $17MM in investment.

Click here to listen

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Listen to the most recent installment of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, a play.it original in collaboration with CBS!

In the latest episode, Jeremy Shinewald interviews Charlie Kroll, Co-Founder and President of Ellevate Financial and Founder and CEO of Andera, a venture-backed provider of customer acquisition solutions for the financial services industry. Charlie begins his story as a naive 22-year-old running a web development company from his Brown University dorm room, before pivoting to create Andera, a software product highly valued by the banking industry. It wasn’t all smooth sailing—during one particularly tough payroll crunch, Charlie convinced a girlfriend to invest money she had earmarked for a new BMW so that he could make payroll for his seven employees—but Andera succeeded, and was acquired in 2014 by Bottomline Technologies, with more than 500 bank and credit union customers at the time of acquisition.
Download the latest episode to hear Charlie talk more about the brutal early days, the difficult process of learning to question his “unreasonable amount of faith” in other people, and taking a much needed break from startup life on a trip to Indonesia.

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About our host:

Host Jeremy Shinewald is the founder of a portfolio of companies dedicated to supporting the unique aspirations of students and professionals. Jeremy’s firms include mbaMission and jdMission (admissions advisory services for prospective MBAs and lawyers), MBA Career Coaches (career coaching for MBA students and post-MBA professionals) and M7 Financial (accessing graduate student loans). Jeremy was also a founding Venture for America Board Member and is currently the Chair of VFA’s Entrepreneur Board.

Listen to the fourth installment of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, a play.it original in collaboration with CBS!

In the latest episode, our host Jeremy Shinewald sits down with Will Nathan, a VFA supporter whose entrepreneurial instincts took him from a comfortable career in finance to co-founding Homepolish, a bootstrapped interior design startup. The idea for Homepolish was born out of a real need Will faced: he struggled to find an interior designer to help him furnish his new apartment with a comparatively small budget, and the whole process lacked transparency. Luckily, Will met his eventual co-founder—interior designer Noa Santos—and the pair hit it off, making Will’s apartment dreams come true. (In fact, Will is pretty sure that decorating a space together successfully, with all its expenses and stresses, is a pretty good test of professional compatibility.) Soon after, Homepolish was born. 

To hear Will talk about confronting your weaknesses, why he views working too many hours as a “cop out”, and building what’s on your Pinterest board (both literally and figuratively), download the latest episode.

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About our host:

Host Jeremy Shinewald is the founder of a portfolio of companies dedicated to supporting the unique aspirations of students and professionals. Jeremy’s firms include mbaMission and jdMission (admissions advisory services for prospective MBAs and lawyers), MBA Career Coaches (career coaching for MBA students and post-MBA professionals) and M7 Financial (accessing graduate student loans). Jeremy was also a founding Venture for America Board Member and is currently the Chair of VFA’s Entrepreneur Board.

Originally published on entrepreneur.com
T he other day I was chatting with an optometrist and asked how business was. “To be honest, I just sold my practice and felt very lucky to do so,” he told me. “We make most of our money selling glasses, and a company called Warby Parker was eating my lunch. Young people weren’t coming into the shop to buy glasses anymore.”
That conversation got me thinking about innovation — and job loss.
Full disclosure: I love Warby Parker, which sells affordable fashionable glasses directly to consumers. The founders wondered why glasses were more expensive than cellphones and found out that prices had been kept artificially high by a quasi-monopoly, Luxottica, which was marking glasses up as much as 2,000 percent at retail on its various subsidiaries: Lenscrafters, Pearle, Sunglass Hut, Oakley, Ray-ban, even the company that makes the lenses.
Warby Parker challenged the monopoly by going directly to consumers and manufacturing affordable glasses itself, resulting in lowered prices and an impressive social entrepreneurism project to donate glasses to the billion people worldwide that need them. The company’s values are so strong that it’s a certified B Corp, which imposes high standards of social performance, accountability and transparency. Warby Parker is by any estimation one of the best corporate actors you can imagine, and has created 500 jobs with many more to come. Luxottica’s price-gouging also had to end.
Still, the optometrist’s comments made me think about the job loss at offices like his in the years ahead. There are 33,340 optometrists around the country, and each retail location likely employs five to 10 full- and part-time workers. Retail businesses have narrow margins. If you cut off a flow of young consumers, it’s only a matter of time before the businesses struggle and fail.
The same pattern will likely play out with Casper and mattresses, where, just as in the eyewear industry, a handful of major companies control supply and impose high retail markups. Here again, a combination of affordability and service will likely win out: Casper will send you a mattress and let you try it risk-free for 100 days, minimizing the need to head to a store (Warby has a similar practice).
More affordable eyeglasses and mattresses are doubtless a good thing for the economy overall. But the shift will likely dislocate thousands of retail employees and even small businesspeople who have made a living on a decades-long status quo. The hope is, “Well, they’ll go find other, better things to do.” Which is sort of true, and the way the economy’s supposed to work.
But if you’re a retail employee, it’s not like there are a ton of other retailers out there growing. And some of the dislocated may not be directly able to take on different forms of work. The optometrist I talked to wasn’t sure what his next step was going to be; he was working part-time at another practice for some income. And he’s obviously highly educated.
These are some of the thoughts behind the pro-entrepreneurship organization, Venture for America, that I started, to encourage more of our young people to head to early-stage growth companies around the country. Our goal is to help create 100,000 new U.S. jobs by 2025. Venture for America operates in communities that could generally use more innovation: Detroit, New Orleans, Baltimore and other U.S. cities. So I’m obviously a big believer in innovation and progress as key drivers of economic growth and prosperity. As a society we can’t hide from the future; we have to build and own it.
But the optometrist’s story reminded me that certain forms of innovation and efficiency will often reduce opportunities for others who are generally less able to adapt. The market is going to be cruel to some. And as such, there’s a big opportunity and need for shifting and preparing our human capital for areas of growth, away from shrinking sectors. The need is only going to get more significant in the next few years.
The biggest change coming down the pike is the self-driving cars. There’s now a fake town in Michigan for self-driving cars to roam around so we can figure out how they can operate in snow, under difficult conditions, etc. The estimate for when self-driving cars will become mainstream is around 2035, 20 years from now. But for the moment, there are currently about 887,000 bus drivers, taxi drivers, and chauffeurs in the United States,, many of whom have been driving for years. What will they do when cars drive themselves?
If the above is freaking you out a bit, the answer lies in investing in different types of innovation.There are examples, like the ones above, of new companies disrupting an existing industry, setting off waves of job losses: Amazon eliminating bookstores around the country, and Craigslist and the internet in general making local newspapers obsolete are recent examples.
But not all innovations are going to eliminate jobs. Happily, there are some that are almost purely job-creating. Call these nondisruptive innovations, or job-creating enterprises.
Take LinkedIn. Before it existed, most business communications and recruiting happened over email and the phone. We maintained our “connections” in a physical Rolodex of business cards. Now, we more easily maintain our professional networks via LinkedIn and recruiters use the site to inform people of available positions. Salespeople solicit interested parties, etc. LinkedIn has lowered boundaries and made connections much more efficient. Instead of displacing recruiters, it made them more effective.
Starbucks, meanwhile, employs 182,000 people in the United States and around the world, and I’d argue that most of those jobs came about because they grew the pie and changed the culture. Before Starbucks, there wasn’t as much of a coffeehouse routine; we generally drank really cruddy diner coffee. Now, high-end coffee and a “third place” are baked into the national routine. While I’m sure some local cafes were displaced, Starbucks created even more jobs by creating a new demand and changing the culture.
Most any company that offers an innovative product or service is growing the pie, at least incrementally. One of our Venture America fellows, Brian Rudolph, started a company called Banza that makes gluten-free, low-carb, high-protein pasta out of chickpeas. It employs 12 people in a manufacturing plant in Michigan. Banza is expanding the market of consumers of pasta to include the health-conscious, gluten-intolerant, etc. Another set of fellows started Compass, which connects small businesses to freelance technologists to build their web presence, helping small brick-and-mortar businesses gain access to new customers.
For the future, the challenge is going to be balancing the pace of job-dislocating innovation with enough job-creating innovation to grow the pie and create opportunities in diverse places for people of diverse backgrounds. For every Whatsapp, the mobile messaging service which was acquired for $19 billion with only 55 employees (most of whom were highly educated and technical), we’re going to need hundreds of more companies like Starbucks and Banza that employ people from different walks of life.
It’s one of the challenges that results from centering innovation in a place like Silicon Valley — where “disruption” occurs in a traditional sense.
This is not to say that companies that only employ college graduates and engineers don’t create wealth and opportunities for a variety of people. In The New Geography of Jobs, Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti estimated that every information-sector job supports between two and five other jobs in the community, ranging from bartenders, babysitters, hairdressers and landscapers to teachers, nurses and doctors. The hair salons in Atherton are a lot busier than those in Grand Rapids.
Some innovation, then, is going to destroy jobs; some is going to create them. We need to recognize the difference, and invest a ton in the latter to make the coming wave of dislocation as much of a positive opportunity as possible.
>>Check out more posts by Andrew Yang here