It was a bittersweet ending to our fourth ever Training Camp… an unbelievable summer of personal growth and professional learnings comes to a close, but a new chapter awaits for our class of 2015 Fellows. From building websites and sharpening their technical skills to personality assessments and emotional intelligence training, Fellows are heading to their cities equipped with the hard and soft skills needed to hit the ground running.
Before we sign off from Training Camp for the summer, let’s take a look back at our final week.

Finishing Strong

Branding 101: To kick off week 5, Bill Schley, C0-founder of BrandTeamSix and author of The Unstoppables dove into the nitty gritty of building and selling a brand. Schley stressed facts over feelings and the importance of telling stories with competitive claims. Senior Director of Mega-Brand, Michael Megalli talked about the continuous process of building a brand and how “you can never stop tinkering,” when working towards your vision.

Talent on Talent: Monday evening, 2015-ers crushed the stage during the highly anticipated talent show, which featured: the awesome aca-fellows acapella, a variety of acoustic musical performances, some impressive magic tricks, a chilling scary story and a comedic VFA infographic, among many others. Charlie Weikert showcased his hardcore yo-yo mastery and took home the grand prize: a free roundtrip to any VFA city.
Actionable advice: On Wednesday, our very own Mike Tarullo gave an incredibly practical run down of how to be a great startup employee and immediately add value to your organization.
Laying down the law: Later in the day we were joined by attorneys Niki Cubines and Allison Grein from RPL Law Firm to talk about appropriate ways Fellows can approach micro-inequities, mediations and settlement discussions in the workplace.

Final words of advice: Ben Kamens, lead developer and employee #4 at Khan Academy, ended the training on a great note as our final guest speaker. Kamens delivered a rich and pragmatic presentation on what it really means to add value to an organization and to the world. 
Straight from the Red Carpet: Martha Ruiz is the Co-leader of PwC’s Oscar’s balloting team. She is one of two people in the world who knows the identities of Oscar winners before they are elected! Ruiz shared some stories about her own experience in this role and talked to Fellows about the process of gaining sponsorship.

The Last Challenge: Value Proposition

For their final challenge, Fellows were tasked with an individual project that would help add or create value for themselves and/or their communities and companies. 2015-ers Joel Kaplan and Nathan Robertson, for example, eased the transition into their new jobs at Indigo Project by creating promotion decks and detailed work agendas. On a completely different note, Jack Wise, a Fellow headed to Philly to work at VeryApt, is creating a free youth football camp to run in his spare time. We can’t wait to see these, and many other projects come to fruition over the next two years!

The Final Farewell

The week’s activities culminated in a final closing ceremony at the Providence Public Library. We recognized and celebrated the hard work and outstanding performance of the Fellows and their teams, including ten individuals who received a “Top 10 Fellow” award (featured below). The evening was bittersweet, as the newly formed community said their goodbyes and looked ahead to their new lives that await them.

Thanks again to our generous sponsors who help make Training Camp possible and have offered their support throughout the whole process!
                   

Each week during Training Camp, we’re lucky enough to be joined by world class trainers and speakers. Earlier this month, we hosted Courtney Emerson, Co-Founder and COO of All In Together, a “non-partisan, collaboration-driven campaign to empower women with the tools they need to drive meaningful change.” In her guest post below, Courtney expands on her Training Camp presentation, outlining ways to foster an inclusive company culture, as well as her own personal strategies for navigating the entrepreneurship world.

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In May, Liz Dolan, CMO of Fox International Channels, resigned from Quiksilver Inc.’s board. Her departure made waves — it meant that the board’s gender diversity went from low to nonexistent (Dolan was the only woman on the board). Her reason for resigning? The unconscious bias she faced from the board’s other members.
Her resignation serves as a reminder to all of us that we need to remember what diversity really means — and why it matters. Yes, there are many positive benefits associated with gender and racial diversity in leadership: research shows that when you have more diversity in leadership, companies see increased sales revenue and profits, and more customers. But inclusion — the lack of which caused Dolan to resign — is equally critical. In Dolan’s own words: “What I learned is that even when a woman earns a seat at the table, the men can put you in a soundproof booth.”
This is not to pit women against men; there are many, many men who are great, inclusive leaders. Unfortunately, in both corporations and startups, inclusive cultures are rare. In fact, only 11% of corporations report that they have an inclusive culture. Stories of successful startups accused of discrimination or harassment of women and other minority groups are far too common. To be clear: the lack of inclusion in startups often has nothing to do with ill will or bias of the founders. Life at a startup moves quickly. Raising funds, building infrastructure, recruiting new team members all take priority and many do not have the time or money to have dedicated HR departments; as a result, culture can take a backseat to getting things done.
My professional experience has spanned a range of environments, from the inclusive to the less so. Here are three strategies I’ve found to be particularly effective in navigating both the corporate and startup worlds as a member of an underrepresented group:

1. Build your personal board of directors

Take a look at your organization — who has power and influence? You want them as your sponsor. Figure out what’s important to them, help them deliver it, and remember that it’s not all about you. Prioritize their request when they ask for your help and remember that sponsorship is built on trust: if sponsors are going to use their influence on your behalf, they need to know you will deliver and represent their organization in the best possible light.
Earlier in my career, I was in charge of leading a women’s leadership program for a Fortune 100 company. After my presentation, my client came up to me congratulating me on a job well done and shared how impressed his bosses (company executives) were with my performance. I thanked him and began to prep for the rest of the day when he said: “Given your age, they were concerned about whether you were going to be able to deliver – but I vouched for you and convinced them you would do an amazing job. Thanks for proving me right.”
Relationships like this in the workplace are critical — when people are in your corner, the unconscious biases people may have about you (in my case, my age) can be countered and diminished. Particularly important are mentors and sponsors. The advice mentors provide as more experienced professionals is invaluable — and sponsors also advocate for you and can help you advance within an organization.
Final word on the subject: don’t be afraid to create new communities or opportunities to network. Just take a look at VFA alum Kate Catlin who founded Women Rising, an organization that helps female professionals connect with their peers and find mentors. 

2. Develop your executive presence

The MIT Sloan School of Management conducted a study in which two voices, male and female, delivered a pitch. The script and slides of the pitch were identical — but the male voice was 40% more likely to receive funding. Many still associate leadership with white, male voices and faces, but simple behaviors can help you amplify your voice and point of view. Work to identify bad habits in your communication. Use a smartphone to record yourself during a call or business meeting. Do you use a lot of filler words — such as “um” or “like”? Do you have a tendency to ramble or make the same point multiple times? If you can, recording a video of yourself is even better; as Amy Cuddy shares, body language is a hugely powerful influencer when it comes to how people perceive us and how we perceive ourselves. (I highly recommend watching her entire TED talk.) Be proactive about asking for feedback (don’t wait for your review!) and push for clarity if it’s too vague.

3. Leverage your own unique perspective – and the perspectives of others

Your diverse traits are of huge value to your organization, no matter the size. What is unique about you? What experiences have you had that make you different from others? Do you have a better understanding of a specific group (e.g., Millennials) because you’re one of them? Use that to your advantage!
Finally, some of you may be starting your own companies over the next few years. No matter how much is going on, work to create a “speak up,” inclusive culture in your organization and hold others accountable to do the same. Hire, mentor and sponsor people who are not like you — this only increases your ability to get things done and be innovative. Empower others to share their ideas, their feedback, and take it seriously. One of the best managers I ever had ended almost every email to me with, “What do you think?” — a subtle indicator that my opinion mattered, despite our difference in level.
Change may not happen overnight, but let’s do what we can to elevate our own voices as well as the voices of others — a more inclusive workplace, and world, depends on it.

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 the most recent episode of Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast, Jeremy chats with Jess Brondo Davidoff, Founder & CEO of Admittedly, a company that gamifies the college admission process for high school students — not only providing lessons and tools to help them understand the admissions process and keep them on track, but also helping to match them with the best colleges and universities for them.
Like many entrepreneurs, Jess has embraced risk throughout her career. In 2005, she founded The Edge in College Preparation, a wildly successful test prep company. At the company’s peak, Jess was making $15,000 per student for college admissions counseling, and up to $500 an hour for test prep. She opened offices all over the world and grew revenue a whopping 500% in just five years. After seven years of growth, Jess wanted to have a larger impact in the education space, and realized she could not achieve this goal working one-on-one with only elite high school students. So she took a leap of faith and founded Admittedly, hoping to help a wider range of high schoolers looking for information on the perfect colleges and universities for them.
Download this week’s episode to hear Jess share what it was like to walk away from her first very successful business in order to follow her passion, lessons from splitting with a co-founder, and her experience growing her company in two accelerators.

In this episode, Jeremy chats with Jess Brondo Davidoff, Founder & CEO of Admitted.ly, a company that gamifies the college admission process for high school students to help match them with colleges and universities. Jess shares what it was like to walk away from a very successful business that she founded to follow her passion and gives advice from her experience participating in 2 accelerators.

Click here to listen

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Seun Oyewole is a 2014 Fellow working as a Venture Development Analyst at Invest Detroit, a community development financial institution. Seun got his degree in Foreign Service with a specialization in Regional & Comparative Studies between America and the Middle East at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Studies. Seun helped lead a session on the art of “Grinding and Hustling” for a group of 2015-ers at this year’s Training Camp. 
At this point in our lives, we understand that lifestyle transitions are inevitable as we take on the task of growing up. Sometimes these transitions are expected, and other times they emerge without anticipation; yet, it is up to that person to adjust their habits, buckle down and strive for success.
Like any life transition, it will be tough – you are moving into a new environment that will serve as your scene to live, work and play in. Although this next episode is a bit daunting, there are key tools & strategies that will help maintain your ability to grind at work & hustle on your personal goals.

Time Management

The day often moves quickly when working in a fast-paced, whimsical startup setting. I have found success in my daily productivity by partitioning my workday into time periods that are allocated to the different projects that I may be working on. It is one thing to setup this calendar of time-blocks, but it is another thing to keep your nose down & put the pedal to the metal.
There are a range of tools that reduce the time you would have normally spent on thankless tasks: Spokeo is a reverse email search engine that assists in identifying a person’s digital mailbox. Boomerang is a Chrome extension that allows Gmail users to send scheduled emails for group outreach and delicate communications.

Remain Informed

With the near-seamless access to information we have in our generation, it is expected that you are knowledgeable on some topic or sector. I am an avid fan of curated news-digests like Mike Allen’s Playbook or Mattermark Daily as they address subjects and industries that I keep up with.
For more personal news curation, you can use Backstit.ch to select topics of interest, and the platform will search for articles across publications, RSS feeds and social media platforms and then synthesize them through a minimalist display.

Your Network is Your Net Worth

No need for clarification on this age-old adage. Developing & maintaining new relationships can be a matter of dropping a note to someone every few months. Since my graduation, I have kept a spreadsheet of my contacts ranging from DC to NYC to Doha that details the last time we spoke and what the discussion was on. It helps me remain up-to-date with my network.
Rapportive has also been an extremely helpful tool for me to do initial research on new connections that I have been digitally introduced to. This Chrome extension displays an email contact’s LinkedIn profile while you are working in Gmail.
Similar to many SaaS companies, grinding & hustling is scalable. A diligent fellow is expected to propel their company’s trajectory while enhancing their productivity and time optimization. As important as it is to assist in your start-up’s progression, it is just as crucial for the diligent fellow to build their social capital in their new environment, and develop a brand for themself. Cliché or not, it has to be understood that there is levels to this sh*t and you are doing yourself a tremendous service if you begin to develop strategies that make you more efficient.
 

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 week’s episode, Jeremy sits down with Gary Chou, a longtime Venture for America supporter and a true renaissance man. Gary’s career represents an unusually wide range of experiences: he’s worked as a film producer, the Chief Strategist at Cisco Media, the General Manager at Union Square Ventures, a roadie for his friend’s band — and, if you can believe it, even more. Currently, Gary owns and operates a space in Manhattan called Orbital, which functions both as a coworking space and as a community to help people develop ideas and build side projects through boot camps and other programming. (Or, in Gary’s more succinct words: “a space to do awesome stuff.”)
Gary attributes the diversity of his prior roles to his wide network — to Gary, careers are in part “a function of who you spend time with.” He describes Orbital as the first project he started deliberately, at a time when he was ready to do his own thing. But even Orbital involved some serendipity. When Gary heard that Kickstarter was moving out of their office in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he inquired about the space without much of a plan — and before he  knew it, he was taking meetings with the landlord and inventing Orbital on the fly. To Gary, Orbital represents an articulation of themes he’s been thinking about for years: community; projects that don’t fit into a strict startup narrative; creating the space to learn and fail; the urgency to use your time well. As he reflects in this episode: “Time is all we have.”
Download the most recent episode of the #VFApodcast to hear Gary’s thoughts on how space can help build communities, the privilege of having time to think, and how building something is like surfing (hint: it has a lot to do with falling off the board, getting back up again, and seeing where the wave takes you).

Four down, one to go! The Fellows were re-energized during our second to last week here in Providence, absorbing workshops, panel discussions and lectures by day, and building working prototypes for new products by night. Toss in some trampoline dodgeball, a trip to the Roger Williams Zoo, and VFA-wide “selfie challenge,” and we’ll call it a pretty good week. Check out the recap video and a closer look below!
https://vimeo.com/134135751

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 The Product Challenge: Let the Building Begin

Strapped with a two-day intensive workshop from world-class design firm, IDEO, the fellows were given one week to build a working prototype of a product that uses “human-centered design” to solve a real-world problem. They were tasked with redesigning a specific experience, e.g. buying a car, riding an elevator, waiting on line for fast food, and creating a product to improve that experience for the customers or users.
After the IDEO trainers framed the challenge and laid out the ground rules, Fellows took to the city of Providence –from local bike shops to the Roger Williams Zoo– to better understand the true needs of the people they were designing products for. They learned the ins and outs of the design thinking process, beginning with field research and ending with prototyping a functional product.

The Fellows learned in a few short days that constraints can produce some impressive results. From phone apps that help first time car buyers navigate the buying process to technology that improves the customer experience at a pharmacy, the teams all put the knowledge gleaned from the IDEO workshops to work. One team, however, emerged from the pack and proved to have the most innovative, useful and scalable product of all – Congrats to the 2015 Product Challenge winners! The team “Waterfire”created a healthy and affordable pre-packaged meal service to help make eating fresh produce an easier and cheaper option. Sign us up!

Thank you to our visitors!

IDEO: Kicking off week 4 with some of VFA’s favorite workshops, IDEO joined us in Providence to deliver a full 2-day training on Design Thinking. By the time time we sadly waved goodbye to the IDEO team, the Fellows were fully equipped (with lots of post it notes among other things…) to hit the streets of Providence and begin the process of building solutions for real-world problems.
Charlie Kemper: As Co-Founder of Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator and Founding Managing Director of Revel Partners, Charlie lives and breathes entrepreneurship. Demonstrating his love for mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs, Charlie spent the entire day working with the Fellows and sharing valuable feedback to help them develop their new products.

Barbara Tannenbaum: Few people have as much charisma as Brown professor Barbara Tannenbaum. By captivating the audience from start to finish, Barbara walked the walk while impeccably delivering her advice on performance and public speaking. The Fellows learned how to become more compelling communicators by “taking up space,” using both their words and body language.

Jeremy Shinewald: The Fellows finished on a high note last week by learning from another seasoned entrepreneur, Jeremy Shinewald, who is the Founder of mbaMission, jdMission, and Co-Founder of M7 Financial. Giving a face to the renowned voice of VFA’s podcast, Jeremy came to Training Camp to deliver an informative talk on how to bootstrap your startup.
Entrepreneur Panel: Charlie Kroll, founder of Andera and one of VFA’s earliest inspirations, hosted a panel discussion on the reality of life as an entrepreneur. Charlie was joined by Will Nathan, Co-Founder of Homepolish, Michelle Marinis, Co-Founder of Little Spoon Organic, Katie Beck, COO of 4.0 Schools, and Stephanie Kaplan Lewis, Co-Founder of Her Campus Media.
We were also lucky enough to recruit a rockstar panel of judges for the Product challenge including Noah Glass, Darren MacDonald, Kathleen Warner, Jay Adya, our friends at UBS, Rita Rodin, Eric Starr, Bob Chatham, and Kevin Tung.

And to our generous supporters who make this all possible!

Special shout out this week to the Rhode Island Foundation, who has supported us since day 1 and made all of our work in Providence possible. We celebrated four great years at our annual mixer last week at the office of long-time VFA partner company, Swipely!
                
 
 
 
 

This week Jeremy sits down with Gary Chou, Founder of Orbital, a company that helps people develop side projects and ‘a space to do awesome stuff’. A long time Venture for America supporter and incredibly interesting individual, Gary shares his storied history as a film producer, General Manager at Union Square Ventures and much more.

Click here to listen

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2015 Fellow Nathan Roberston reflects on the significance of choosing a career path that will create value for himself and for those around him.  After Training Camp Nathan is headed to Colorado where he’ll be working for Indigo Project, a company that seeks to measure and cultivate non-academic skills that were previously considered untestable. 
 Visit apply.ventureforamerica.org for more information on becoming a VFA Fellow.
Name: Nathan Robertson
College or University: University of Oklahoma
Major: Public Relations 
Hometown: Tulsa, Oklahoma
Fellow Class: 2015
I remember the first time I read Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The book tells the story of a man who lives his entire life dutifully following the societal norms of 19^th century Russia. He realizes at the end of his life that he made so little impact on the world he lived in that he’s not even sure of his own identity. It’s no fun read, but it is an alarmingly accurate depiction of the road many young graduates choose—a path of stability and acceptance that leads to a life unremarkable.
I felt like I was placed on a career track early in my undergraduate years. It was as simple as checking all the right boxes, shaking a few hands and grabbing a decent internship before landing safely at an advertising or PR agency. Many of the alumni from my journalism school came back yearly to woo students with stories of high-profile clients, a metropolitan lifestyle and what sounded like a gratuitous amount of booze.
But I dug beneath all the anecdotes and recruiting tactics and never met someone that could look me in the face and say their job fulfilled them. Most of the people I met just pushed papers without being aware of the big picture. Their ability to impact the world was marginalized, and following them felt like choosing a road eerily similar to Ivan Ilyich’s.
I stumbled into co-founding my first startup during my junior year of college. I still remember filing the LLC with my friends at the state capitol in Oklahoma City thinking, “What the heck am I doing?” A summer spent in a local accelerator quickly socialized me to the modern entrepreneurial community. I met people who’d confidently tell their mechanical wheelchair lift or in-car mechanics analytics system would change the world. They were on a mad journey, but it fulfilled them.
Startups are unique organizations in any society—they gather a series of unrelated resources and re-organize them into something new that didn’t previously exist. In the United States today, capitalism and individual celebrities regularly catapult new startups with young tech people– Ping-Pong tables and the next big thing to the top. But they aren’t doing anything revolutionary, they are doing what new companies have done since the beginning of civilized trade: gathering resources and re-organizing them to solve a problem and create new value.
What drew me to VFA (and what still affirms that original choice) is the desire to create value in the world in which I live. The idea is attractive to the young and idealistic, but it will come with certain sacrifices as I continue down the road. Many of my more risk-averse friends and colleagues are skeptical about my choice, and not without good reason. I could pursue this desire for 50 years and make no tangible impact. I could consistently shuffle resources trying to create something that solves a problem without ever reaching my goal.
But consider these words from Theodore Roosevelt:
“It is not the critic who counts…The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…who comes short again and again…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Using value creation as the metric by which you judge your professional impact is scary. It promises no reward for your risk and no comfort if you fall short. But I would rather be Teddy’s man in the arena who spends his life trying. I would rather be an entrepreneur whose standard of excellence is adding value to the world.
I would rather be a Venture for America Fellow. Wouldn’t you?

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, Jeremy interviews Noah Glass, Founder & CEO of Olo, the fastest-growing digital ordering provider for the foodservice industry. 
Noah began his career at Endeavor Global, a nonprofit that supports entrepreneurs in emerging markets around the world as they develop high-impact companies. There, he launched the first African Endeavor affiliate office in South Africa. Throughout his work abroad and with aspiring entrepreneurs, Noah recognized the opportunity for smart phones to revolutionize the e-commerce space, particularly in the food industry. Noah’s idea was novel at the time: order food on a smart phone, and arrive at the restaurant to find your meal ready and waiting.
When Noah returned to the US to attend Harvard Business School, he ran his idea and a prototype by David Frankel, a member of Endeavor’s board. David gave Noah an offer too good to refuse: if Noah quit his job and withdrew from Harvard, David would would seed the budding idea.
Olo was a fledgling company in 2006 when Noah, wearing a sandwich board on Wall Street, happened to hand a flyer to a Wall Street Journal reporter. After an article ran in the WSJ, Good Morning America invited Noah to appear on the show. Soon Noah’s phone was ringing off the hook from restaurants who wanted in on this novel idea.
Download the most recent episode of the #VFApodcast to hear how Noah and the Olo team scaled the business, transitioned from a B2C (business to consumer) company to one of the first SaaS B2B (business to business) companies of its time, and scored clients like Carvel and Cold Stone Creamery to become the “ice cream cake platform.”
 

Originally published on huffingtonpost.com
I had a meeting with Ben Hecht, the head of Living Cities several months ago. He regularly communes with the leaders of major foundations, and he described what’s on most of their minds as this problem: “In less than 30 years, the majority of the US population will be non-white. And at that point, if current trends hold, the new majority will have lower rates of income, wealth, education, political participation, and physical freedom than the minority.” Translation: we’re heading to systemic inequality along, of all things, racial lines.
Wow. I hadn’t thought of it before that conversation, but since then it’s been impossible to forget. It’s the kind of thing that prompts major business leaders to want to start a dialogue on race. One likes to think of America as the land of equality and opportunity. But we’re heading in the opposite direction. And the problem isn’t fixing itself. The recent violence in Baltimore and the debate around the composition of police forces and leadership in communities are an early sign of an issue that will only gain in force and immediacy.
I didn’t think too much about this when I started Venture for America four years ago. My motivation was that we needed more of our top people starting businesses to counteract low rates of business formation (yes, despite the hype around tech, rates of new business formation are at multi-decade lows, which I thought was a major economic disaster). The needs were particularly pressing in Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans and other cities. I believed that if you start a successful company, jobs get created in the economy for both skilled and unskilled workers. In his book The New Geography of Jobs, economist Enrico Moretti argues that every new information sector position creates between 2 to 5 additional jobs from bartenders, babysitters, and landscapers to teachers and nurses. If we create enough new companies, there will be additional opportunities for people at every rung of the educational ladder.
While running Venture for America, it’s become clearer to me that the structural impediments around women and underrepresented minorities starting businesses are significant. Starting a successful company is one of the hardest things anyone does. If you start with less money, have fewer investors who see you as investable, have fewer role models and mentors, and have more people in your family relying upon you, founding a company is that much more daunting and unrealistic. The image of entrepreneurship as the province of the unprivileged and unentitled – the Horatio Alger, rags to riches myth – flies in the face of reality. Many of the scrappy young people I meet who are the first in their family to go to college feel that they have to bring home a steady paycheck to make their family’s sacrifices worthwhile.
The dynamics of our economy today are such that the advantages of financial capital, social capital and education are stronger than ever. There’s never been a better time to be a Stanford engineer or hedge fund manager. The question is how does the black high school grad in Cleveland or the Latino community college student in San Antonio participate in and benefit from today’s economy (aside from having a better device)? Having Internet access and a Facebook account are not the equivalent of access to education and economic advantage.
It’s my hope that Venture for America can become part of the solution by recruiting and training future founders and leaders of diverse backgrounds. Our 2015 class is set to be 20% African American and Latino – not quite the 29% that would match the US population, but a start. We believe that we can provide some of the network, experience, confidence, exposure and access to capital that will spark some of the next generation of entrepreneurs. If more people from different communities start and run businesses, opportunity will be much more accessible.
I know there are many other people who care deeply about this and have much more direct experience with it than I do. I recently met Gerald Chertavian of YearUp, which trains and channels diverse young people into roles at major corporations. Gerald started YearUp fifteen years ago – today it has a budget of $100 million and transforms thousands of lives per year. One YearUp alum, Jay Hammonds, experienced incredibly tough circumstances – he was left by his parents when he was four years old and was later going to drop out of college. He went through YearUp, and today is thriving as an IT manager at Facebook. Jay is a great young man who is making the most out of an opportunity. YearUp has launched a campaign, Grads of Life, encouraging employers to seek out more people with diverse backgrounds.
2043 – the year that the U.S. is projected to become majority minority – will be here before we know it. My kids will be in their twenties. Ideally, this occasion will be not that big a deal because of the inclusive economy we’ve built and how access to education and opportunity is widespread across people of different backgrounds. Unfortunately, this won’t happen on its own. A lot of people, and a lot of institutions, are going to have to dig deep and do tons of work for the next couple of decades to make it happen.
>>Check out more posts by Andrew Yang here

In this episode Jeremy interviews Noah Glass, Founder & CEO of Olo, the fastest-growing digital ordering provider for the foodservice industry. Noah recounts his experience building the Endeavor South Africa office and the decision to withdraw from Harvard Business School to seize the opportunity to reinvent e-commerce in the food industry using smart phones.

Click here to listen

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