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!
“You get to have seven careers,” Eric Cantor says to our host, Jeremy Shinewald, during this week’s episode. And if anyone should know, it’s Eric. After founding and exiting two internet infrastructure companies way ahead of the curve, Eric got a master’s from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and, eager to walk the walk, moved to east Africa. He spent six years in Kenya and Uganda, working with the Acumen Fund and the Grameen Foundation to develop mobile technology solutions for marginalized communities—and then he changed course again.
Continuing on the path of conscious entrepreneurship, Eric now serves as the VP of Product Development at Neighborhood Trust, the leading provider of financial advising to underserved workers based in New York City. There, he’s developing a product called PayGoal, a tool that helps people solve their cashflow problems. PayGoal is still in beta, but recently won a national innovation challenge awarded by the Financial Solutions Lab—as Eric points out, “Everything is beta until it’s real.” Eric values this kind of pragmatism. “Getting people higher pay would be great,” he says, regarding the millions of Americans who experience cashflow problems on a monthly basis—but solving that problem is hardly a one-man, or one-company, undertaking. Instead of despairing at the enormity of the issue, Eric’s beginning to chip away at this problem in his own groundbreaking, scalable way.
And—as if you needed any other reasons to click play—as an early board member, Eric has been instrumental in helping to build VFA from the very beginning.
Download this week’s episode to hear Eric talk about why the corporate sector wasn’t for him, what it was like to found an internet company long before internet was a household word, and how business can add resources and fix problems—rather than “pillage.”