My career is a choice that indicates my values 

I knew that VFA was the right choice for me when I realized that becoming a Fellow would give me the best chance to find what I was looking for: to work directly with business owners who are creating jobs and having a positive impact on their communities. I was also excited by the possibilities that the program offered: an amazing community of recent graduates from across the country coming together around a common mission to revitalize the United States through entrepreneurship.
I gravitated towards entrepreneurship as a young child, even before I could spell or pronounce the word. Throughout my childhood, friends and family couldn’t escape my latest small business venture when they visited our house, whether it was a miniature golf course set up in the basement, a puppet show complete with tickets and popcorn, a video production company, or another idea. So it was no surprise to my friends and family when I chose to pursue an entrepreneurial career.

After joining the high school cross country and track and field teams, I set out to create a website to promote the school’s running teams. The website soon grew into a small business venture that continued until graduation. When it came time to decide what was next, I decided to follow my passion for entrepreneurship to Babson College, a small business school outside of Boston with one of the nation’s strongest reputations for preparing aspiring entrepreneurs.
At Babson, I came to value being surrounded by talented, inspiring, and motivated people. I learned a great deal during my first year from the launching of a philanthropic business and even more the following summer working for a small socially conscious startup company. These experiences reinforced my desire to be part of something that made a positive impact on the larger community.
As I began my final year of college, I investigated traditional career opportunities and was fortunate to have offers that would provide a comfortable starting salary and clear path ahead. Yet, over the weeks and months of interviews, it became clear to me that I wanted to start my career by working in an environment that would provide opportunities to learn, grow and be challenged in a meaningful and unique way. I continued my search and I was excited one day when I learned about VFA. After digging deeper, I was surprised that no one from Babson College—a school known for its commitment to entrepreneurship—had ever joined the program. After connecting with my school’s career center, contacting VFA, and speaking with current Fellows, I knew that this was the type of unique and ambitious program that I was searching for. I am continually excited by the opportunities that I found through Venture for America: to follow my passions, make an impact, and be part of something larger that myself.
 
 
 

Originally Published on Elitedaily.com by Cathryn Woodruff ’15

Although the popular image of a startup includes long hours furiously coding behind a laptop, my experience has been quite the opposite. Instead, I find myself spending multiple hours a day reading facial expressions and assessing body language cues.
I’m not a psychologist or a CIA agent. In fact, I work for a food startup.
But I’ve become a master at one particular facial expression: the face of surprised delight. It makes my day every time I see it. I’m on the founding team at Banza. We created the first pasta made from chickpeas. The only real way to get people to fall in love with the product is to bring it straight to their taste buds. Recently, we’ve been doing a series of “demo sprints” in different stores across the country. This involves our seven-person team quite literally running around the city to bring our pasta to the people. Every day, we’re on the battlefield and fighting for shelf space in the pasta aisle. I get this bizarre satisfaction from someone trying just one noodle. I hope to get it on people’s radars, into their mouths and hopefully into their carts as well.
This experience has taught me about those intangible, “off-résumé” skills it takes to build a business. They aren’t skills you can endorse on LinkedIn, but I’ve learned they are vital for survival in the startup world.

Enthusiastically pitch the company repeatedly.

Your product, idea or service may be incredibly innovative. But if you can’t communicate that to the consumer in a way that reflects how much you care and believe in it yourself, you won’t sell it. Every conversation with someone is a chance to make him or her fall in love. Attention spans are short, so there are only a few seconds to reel someone in. I’ll talk to 1,000 people in a store on any given day, and the last pitch must be just as enthusiastic as the first. It’ll be very apparent to people whether or not you genuinely love the product yourself. It makes a huge difference.

Maintain and embody a consistent brand voice

The essence of a brand is very intangible. It’s the amalgamation of every word you write in a customer service email. It’s the tone you use to caption Instagrams, and it’s how you present yourself to your audience. Embodying this and truly owning it are vital skills, skills I’m definitely still figuring out. This is something every brand is constantly negotiating and reevaluating.

Have a “no task is too small” attitude

People are shocked when I say I’m actually on the founding team at the company. Our cofounders are demoing every day, too. Despite the power of technology, the life blood of our company is interacting with our consumer. Every aspect of the business hinges on this ultimate question: Do they like it?
Grocery stores are saturated these days with brands all claiming health benefits. The best way to rise above the noise is by communicating your story. Set up a table and cook up the food. Bring life to the cardboard nutrition label. Building a food brand is way more than the appetizing pictures you post on social media. As flawless as our Excel financial models may be, and as engaged as our Instagram followers are, nothing matters if the product doesn’t sell.
The product won’t sell if you can’t bring it to the people.
No matter how far along we get technologically, people will always enjoy food and the social and emotional experience of eating together among friends. So, as long as we’re all still human, you can find me in a marinara-stained Banza t-shirt, smiling at the woman across the table who just made that “this is surprisingly delicious” face I’ve come to know and love so well. Before joining Banza, I naively assumed the biggest contribution I could make was by quickly learning as many hard skills as possible and plugging away behind a computer. But instead, it’s been learning how to sell a physical product in front of people.
There are no algorithms or coding.
It’s all just human to human interaction.

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• Name: Cathryn Woodruff ’15
• Alma mater: Boston College ’15
• Job: Business Development and Marketing
• Company Banza, a Fellow-founded chickpea pasta company

David Greenberg loves the excitement of moving but hates the drama. While working as a lawyer at a prestigious law firm in New York City, David experienced the hassle of wasted hours trying to update his contact information with 20+ companies. David couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a solution to this inconvenience and after a friend dared him to start a company to solve it, he did! Four years later Updater has raised over $15million and has pivoted from a B to C model to B to B sales, partnering with some major real estate companies. Listen to the latest episode to hear David’s story and how he negotiated an option to buy the Updater URL.

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Originally published by Ryan Chacon on the Leverege Blog. 

We recently added four young and talented Leverege team members thanks in large part to Venture For America (VFA) — so I felt it was a perfect opportunity to write about VFA and share our experience.Venture for America is an organization started by Andrew Yang (author of an excellent book: “Smart People Should Build Things” — definitely worth checking out) with the goal to:

Channel talented young people to early-stage companies in Detroit, New Orleans, Providence and other U.S. cities to train as entrepreneurs. This would help the companies succeed and create jobs in these communities. It would also prepare our young people to go on to become the builders and entrepreneurs our country needs — A.Y.

In an effort to achieve Andrew Yang’s vision, VFA created a “fellowship program for recent college graduates to launch their careers as entrepreneurs. Fellows spend two years in the trenches of a startup in an emerging city, where they learn how to build a business while making an impact. VFA trains Fellows to become highly productive startup employees who can help their companies grow, then provides the mentorship, network, and resources they need to become successful entrepreneurs.” — A.Y.
VFA has already helped over 300 recent grads kick off their careers in a meaningful way — with 26% of their Fellows going on to start their own business. It certainly looks like VFA is well on its way to achieve its goal of creating 100,000 new jobs by 2025 by getting “our best and brightest building again.”
Now that you have some context on VFA you can probably see why we were so excited to be involved. We started our association with VFA a year ago when we were a judge at their Selection Day in 2015. Selection Day is an event where all the Fellow hopefuls come to NYC and are put through an intense, competitive business experience — just imagine a hyper accelerated version of the Apprentice, but with judges and entrepreneurs watching your every move.
Unfortunately, last year we were unable to hire any VFA Fellows since the location of our headquarters was too far from Baltimore (which was added as a VFA city last year). But, if Selection Day was any indication of the level of talent we could add to our team, we knew we had to expand our presence into Baltimore to qualify for the program. That is exactly what we did. So this year we were able to participate in the entire process and compete to hire VFA Fellows.
After Selection Day this year, we were sent a list of the accepted Fellows for the Class of 2016 and we immediately started digging in. We reviewed their LinkedIn profiles, resumes, etc. and began ranking 160+ Fellows based on our needs and organized everything in a shared Google doc. A few weeks after this, VFA sent out credentials to join their Match portal where companies and Fellows have the opportunity to securely connect with one another and begin the interview process. Fellows created profiles about themselves, and companies created job opportunities for Fellows to explore and apply for.
We intended to let the Fellows come to us but soon discovered we were way too eager and started initiating the process. We began sending connection requests to our top choices to set up initial phone interviews. By the time we finished our culling process, things had gotten a little out of hand (in a good way). We had over 50 interviews scheduled over a 2–3 week period! The level of talent was just so good we couldn’t resist. Although that number of interviews put a burden on us internally, we felt it was worth it.
(One thing we did discover was that sometimes the impression you get from reading someone’s resume vs. actually speaking to them can be very different)
Next, we came up with questions — everything from general strength and weakness questions to an abstract set of logic questions that gave us insight into the candidate’s thought process. When you ask someone, unexpectedly, “Which state in the U.S. would they get rid of and why if they had to choose one?”, or “How would you describe the color yellow to someone who is blind?”, you get to see how they think on their feet.
The next couple of weeks flew by with interview after interview (sometimes 6 or 7 in a single day). As we worked through the process and updated our shared Google doc, we started to realize how difficult our decision would be. Each candidate was remarkable in his or her own way. But we’re a startup and difficult decisions are what we do for a living. So we ranked all of the candidates for each of the four positions we had available and invited the top picks to our offices for a more in-depth 2nd interview. The in-person interview was a critical component of our hiring process and allowed both sides to quickly judge cultural and technical fit. We also found that we were able to get verbal commitments in some cases.
After the on-site interviews, we began extending official offers to our top choices. While a few wanted to extend their “free agency” to explore all of their options before committing one way or another, we were ultimately able to land our top picks for each position. We couldn’t be happier with the way things worked out and know our company is stronger now than before we started.
The Fellows begin their two-year fellowship in August after they go through an intense 5-week training camp at Brown University over the summer. Needless to say we are eager to get them up to speed on things here at Leverege and look forward to doing great things together.
(BTW — the entire experience helped us come up with some cool, fun ideas for next year’s VFA recruiting cycle — stay tuned — it will be worth it, I promise.)
We will be releasing a follow up post about our keys to success during the VFA recruitment process — follow our publication to get notified when we post.

Olga Vidisheva was born in Kyrgyzstan and moved to the US to attend Wellesley College. Her story is the quintessential ‘American Dream’. Olga learned English while working in a Japanese restaurant (of all places!) and put herself through college by modeling. While she was at Harvard Business School Olga discovered her passion for boutiques and saw an opportunity to help small clothing stores develop a digital presence. Enter Shoptiques.com, a website that started with only 25 stores and now represents thousands of boutiques across the globe. Download this week’s episode to hear about Olga’s journey and what it was like to be accepted to Y Combinator as the first single non-technical founder.

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