Jessica O. Matthews is one of the most decorated guests we have had on the #VFApodcast. Her accolades include Fortune’s Most Promising Women Entrepreneurs (2015), Forbes 30 under 30 list (2014), Black Enterprise’s Innovator of the Year (2013), and Scientist of the Year by the Harvard Foundation (2012). Jessica is the daughter of an entrepreneur and was always tinkering as a child – she even has the scars to prove it! While getting her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, Jessica enrolled in a class that eventually led to her idea for the SOCCKET a portable, power-generating soccer ball designed to promote physical activity and spread awareness about the global energy problem. Designing and manufacturing the SOCCKET wasn’t easy and Jessica candidly shares the ups and downs of a messy Kickstarter campaign and all that she learned about manufacturing, supply chains, and customer service. Download this weeks episode to hear more about Jessica’s journey and how President Clinton motivated her to quit her day job to pursue Uncharted Play full time.

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Ethan Anderson graduated from Duke University and began his career at McKinsey working on tech projects. Ethan stuck it out for 1.5 years and then left McKinsey to found QuickReturns, a company to help provide reverse logistics services to online retailers. Although Ethan & his team wrote an award winning business plan and received initial funding, they decided not to continue after the internet bubble burst. In true VFA fashion, Ethan felt that he had to gain experience working at an online retailer to better understand the business before he could go on to found something else. He became the Director of Strategy & Analysis at Buy.com where he developed pricing models with machine learning algorithms. After leaving Buy.com, Ethan attended Harvard Business School, worked at Google, and founded another company, Redbeacom, which won first place at TechCrunch 50 and was eventually acquired by Home Depot. Listen to this week’s long distance podcast (sometimes the sound quality isn’t the greatest- bear with us!) to hear more about Ethan’s career and how he came to found his current company, MyTime.

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Originally published on Quartz.com 

Like most people, I look up to and admire the heroes of Silicon Valley (the real ones, not the ones from the TV show). They’ve given rise to services (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber, LinkedIn, Airbnb) that we use every day and make the world a better place. They’ve created value, wealth, and opportunity at unprecedented historic levels.
I’ve also had the chance to meet some of the leading CEOs and entrepreneurs of the Valley and they are, by and large, good-natured, brilliant, and thoughtful people. They’re earnest and committed to building positive things. Some of them are donors to my organization, for which I’m immensely grateful. It’s clear that Silicon Valley is today more than ever the center of innovation and technological progress.
That said, there are a few things about it that are starting to make me nervous.
I’ve had several friends tell me that they’re leaving the Valley because they want to rejoin the real world. A successful entrepreneur told me he fantasizes about leaving because he wants to raise his kids the way he was raised in Rochester, and that his money would effectively triple as soon as he left. Another successful entrepreneur who moved to San Francisco said he felt like “just another cow in the pen,” and that he enjoyed spending time in other parts of the country because it made him feel more like he was making a difference.
What are these people talking about? What are the things that are starting to freak people out about Silicon Valley? There are a few themes that come up again and again:

The epicenter of wealth and young money

There are a lot of young people, generally from very good colleges, making more money than most people will ever see. These are summer college interns (non-engineers) who are being paid $7,000+ a month and getting perks like free flights home to visit on weekends. Bidding wars and five and six-digit signing bonuses are being paid out for freshly minted engineering grads, particularly from Stanford. Average salaries are now close to $200,000 in the Valley, to say nothing of the upside of equity-based compensation, which can be dramatically higher.
All of the above makes business sense—I’d offer the same thing to a young person whom I thought could potentially be a difference-maker. But it’s a lot relatively early in people’s careers.

Supercompetitive

Technology companies tend to operate in winner-take-all spaces and thus adopt a very high-commitment culture. That is, if there are 10 or 100 mapping apps or social networks, the one company left standing is worth billions, and the rest are worth a very small fraction of that (probably only what people will pay for the talent on hand). As a result, the organizations are ultra-efficient and expect long hours and constant availability. It’s either win or lose big for a lot of companies, and there’s not much in-between.
Hard work is awesome. But when you see an army of people staring at their computer screens in the evening post-dinnertime, it’s a little eerie.

War for talent

If you want to win big, you have to get the best troops. Well-resourced tech companies are now on the hunt for talent like never before, building massive recruitment pipelines to hoover up top prospects and engineers. Google recruits the heck out of Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and other top schools offering six-figures to start, plus bonuses. Facebook sponsors hackathons at the top schools, stays in touch with professors, and invests tons of resources in order to be the most visible and obvious employer.
Don’t think that the smart kids haven’t noticed—the proportion of Stanford students majoring in the Humanities has plummeted from over 20% to only 7% this past year, prompting wails among History and English professors whose classes no longer have students. One administrator joked to me that Stanford is now the Stanford Institute of Technology. In 2014, more Harvard Business School Grads went into technology than into banking for the first time since the dot-com era.
Again, I’d do the same thing. But is this the optimal assignment of our best and brightest? And is it a good thing that one of our nation’s top universities seems to be going vocational?

Insular culture/Not awesome at diversity

The corporate campuses and workplace amenities of Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. are legendary. They’re insider tourist attractions. For the average employee, you wake up and drive from a leafy suburb to a grounded spaceship. You stay there and eat the subsidized gourmet dinner with someone who’s a lot like you. Or maybe you take the dark-windowed company bus from San Francisco and tap out emails with headphones on. Even smaller companies are competing on rock climbing walls and ping-pong tables.
This way of life doesn’t generally expose you to people who are living different ways of life. And the people on the bus and spaceship aren’t representative of most of society based on gender or race or education or age. “Silicon Valley is a bubble” doesn’t refer to valuations or money—it refers to the fact that you live in a bubble.

Crazy high cost of living

Simply put, it will blow your mind what things cost in terms of housing in the Bay Area right now. Modest houses for well over a million dollars. Little apartments the same. One bedroom apartments start at over $3,000/month. The average home in Santa Clara county sold for $1.25 million in August of 2015, up 9% from last year. How is a teacher or just about any regular person going to live there?
Even if you can afford to live in a neighborhood, the elevated costs make it easy to compare yourself to others and say, “Well, sure I’m richer than anyone I grew up with, but I’m not that rich, because look at that guy I work with or went to school with or who lives down the block. That guy’s really rich.” It’s not an environment of plenty, but one of keeping up with the Joneses.
These are some of the things that are making people uncomfortable both in and about the Valley. None of these issues are anyone’s fault. It’s just the market at work—the capital market, the market for talent, the real estate market.
It reminds me a fair amount of Wall Street. Wall Street’s public image took a hit post-financial crisis in part because they were bailed out by the government, in part because they contributed to the crisis, and in part because they don’t produce tangible goods and services (no one got as mad at Chrysler, for example).
But another reason Wall Street had trouble maintaining goodwill was because of some of the attributes above—hard-charging, too much too soon, parallel reality, money flowing everywhere, rich white guys, etc. To use a sports metaphor, it’s like the Yankees or Duke University or the Patriots—they start getting hard to root for, unless they’re your home team.

Solve the big problems

Perhaps the biggest critique of Silicon Valley comes from a technologist quoted in Vanity Fair’s recent article by Nick Bilton—“SF tech culture is focused on solving one problem: What is my mother no longer doing for me?”
Getting a car on demand, finding something online, business productivity tools, connecting with people—these are solutions that the market demands and rewards. They make money. Silicon Valley is like Wall Street in that it will fill and pursue market opportunities to their logical extremes.
If there’s one way that Silicon Valley can lead and distance itself from critiques of insularity and out-of-touchness, it’s to tackle the big, thorny, difficult problems that would improve the state of the world. Problems that are messy, protracted, and involve the prospect of failure and embarrassment. They don’t have a ready market. They affect rich and poor alike. They touch flawed systems. They’re less “What did Mom do to make my life better?” and more “What would make Mom proud?” They require you to do more than cut a check, and instead hunker down and grind away for years.
What problems do I mean? Here are a few that come to mind that would give Silicon Valley the moral leadership to match its economic and intellectual might:

Water

We all know that California is stuck in a multi-year drought. It’s the great equalizer. The Bay Area has been hit less hard by water rationing than Southern California, but the dry spell is finally starting to impact people’s ability to water their lawns and take out the Slip ‘N Slide, not to mention its influence on the epic wildfires that are destroying homes all over the state.
Imagine if the resources of Silicon Valley were to tackle this challenge. How about building a water pipeline from Canada to northern California? Megascale desalination, Israeli-style? Large-scale conservation technologies? If there’s something that would get everyone in California declaring companies as heroes it’s this. Water is free in California, but not really—so be the water bringer.

Traffic/infrastructure

One CEO commented that it took him about an hour to make a 15-mile commute in the morning to Palo Alto. I found myself shaking my head at the thought of all of these millionaires inching along in standstill traffic twice a day, even those that did their best to engineer a short commute. While some of their Teslas can drive themselves so the driver can send emails and whatnot, commute length is the single biggest determinant of day-to-day happiness according to psychologists. What use is being a mega-baller if you’re stuck in traffic every day?
I know, Google self-driving cars will go mainstream by 2030 and greatly reduce traffic (and potentially eliminate hundreds of thousands of driving jobs). In the meantime, how about dynamic tolling? Staggered commute times? Jetpacks? A public-private partnership to add four lanes to widen Route 101? Again, whoever did this would be a hero, and could probably name the new lanes after their company.

Diversity and social issues

America is bifurcating fast. Social mobility is down, technological unemployment is rising, and we’re heading toward a country where the non-white majority in 2043 will have lower levels of income, wealth, education, physical freedom, and political participation than the white minority. That’s the country kids are growing into.
Technology companies are starting to focus on getting more diversity in their own organizations, which is a great place to start. But there’s much more that can be done.
Take the current controversy over policing. You’re telling me that the best non-lethal weapon we can give an officer in 2016 is a Taser with a range of 25 feet that was developed back in 1974? Or that I can have a video camera on my phone but we can’t stick one on every badge?
Is there really no better system than to rely on overworked guidance counselors and standardized testing at age 16 to identify talented minorities in inner cities?
Technologists could do a lot to lead in the right direction.

Education

National SAT scores are at their lowest points in a decade. Online education is ubiquitous, yet we don’t seem to be getting any smarter. If anything, it’s kind of the opposite. We have decades of research on effective education that isn’t being implemented nationwide. Meanwhile, we plow millions of kids through a factory system that was designed in the agrarian era.
I love Altschool, Minerva Project, and the Khan Academy, but we’re still just scratching the surface of both the opportunity and the need around the country. So many people want this, it’s unreal. There’s even money in this one—the US spends $621 billion on public education, with uneven results.
Is filling out bubbles with a pencil on a test designed in 1901 still the best we can do to measure human potential?
I’m optimistic because this generation of techies is starting to have kids. Nothing motivates you to figure out what’s going on with a system more than when your kid has to enter it (even private schools).

Government

When technologists interact with government, they tend to focus either on things that are good for their business interests (immigration, internet access) or libertarianism (stay out of the way). Otherwise, money gets lost in a maze. It’s a swamp, another world. The operating system of the government is out-of-date and needs an update—only it’s not capable of updating itself.
Don’t let the system scare you off. Look at Lawrence Lessig—he’s a law professor who’s trying to get money out of politics and crowdfunded $11 million dollars to do it. That’s how much Google spent on lobbying last year.
Or Jen Pahlka and Code for America, which sends coders and designers to save cities money by showing them what a lean, talented team can do.
Or Megan Smith who left Google to become CTO of the US, along with the wave of heroes who moved to Washington DC to save Healthcare.gov.
It’s still your country. Don’t give up on it.

Unsexy entrepreneurship

For Silicon Valley denizens, this is the golden age of entrepreneurship. But if you look across the country, entrepreneurship is at a 24-year low and most young people are not starting businesses, online or otherwise. They’re looking for jobs in Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, St. Louis, Providence, Cincinnati, San Antonio, upstate New York, and wherever else to pay back loans and maybe start a family.
Entrepreneurship in these other cities looks quite different than it does in the Valley. It’s unsexy and gritty, measured in credit card debt rather than VC meetings, by getting customers instead of visitors or users, by changing the neighborhood instead of changing the world. Companies are started not with a desire to be huge, but because there’s a problem to be solved.
These entrepreneurs look up to the people in the Valley for inspiration. You wouldn’t believe how big a difference it would make to have tech rockstars spend time in these cities and commit to making them better. It would make these entrepreneurs think all things were possible.
These are just problems that come to mind for me. The truth is that you could choose just about anything under the sun that you felt strongly about, as long as it came from a good place.
When I ran a company, I didn’t have time for much else. I thought that the work that I was doing represented the most profound impact and good I could make in the world. I was focused. I wanted to be rich. If someone asked me for help I would make a small contribution, but I felt my greatest contribution was my day job.
After we got acquired, I thought about joining or starting another company. Instead I wound up founding a non-profit to make entrepreneurship more accessible and distributed throughout the US.
That decision has driven the last five years. It’s been a struggle and a massive education. The market’s fuzzier. Nothing is as clean as you want it to be. The humanity of it can be overwhelming.
But underlying the humanity is the conviction that the problem you’re addressing is worth solving. It challenges you in ways similar to having a child—you grow up or you quit, only quitting would make you a loser
Here’s the plea to Silicon Valley: we’re worried you’re losing your soul. Please take on challenges that are worthy of you, that demand your heart, reputation, treasure, commitment, conviction, and values—not just what the market’s asking of you. You’re the builders of this era. It’s not enough. We need you to lead.

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Andrew Yang is the founder and CEO of Venture for America, and the author of Smart People Should Build Things, published by Harper Collins. You can follow Andrew on Twitter at @AndrewYangVFA.
 
 

Amanda Moskowitz started her career in audience analysis at ABC before making a name for herself in mobile messaging SaaS companies – one of which was focused on mobile for brands and advertisers and other, government and non-profits. Today she has “more than one foot” in two different companies which she founded, Stacklist and Nine Naturals. Listen to this week’s episode to hear how Amanda juggles both gigs and the importance of finding the right business partner.

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• Name: Lynsey Chediak ’14
• Alma mater: Claremont McKenna College
• Job: Growth Strategist
• Company: IndieWhip, a media production company

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Slack. I love it. You love it. The startup world nearly ended when it went down for a few hours.
Want to know the singular thing that helped Slack take off? It’s amazing video. You’ve probably seen it. If not, you live under a rock—but watch it here.
In my 18 months as a Venture for America Fellow, I’ve had the incredible opportunity to work at two advertising agencies (both operating on a high-growth startup model). In that time, I’ve held four different positions. Amid the consistent evolution in my specific role, however, the word strategist has never left my job title or my job description; neither has video.
What’s the most important thing I’ve learned? Making something go viral is easier said than done, but it’s possible if you put in the time with the right people. I am part of a team that can ideate, create, and implement a badass marketing strategy to make a video (and the company that releases it) go viral.
Video is what your company needs to achieve the biggest challenge your marketing and sales teams face: creating a lasting emotional connection with your consumer to build the trust that will close a sales deal. Video and a successful growth marketing strategy go hand in hand.

Engagement in marketing is always the goal.

First, let’s talk about that elephant in the room when it comes to marketing: engagement.
I know you’ve tried to avoid it. Stop. It’s the key to growth. You have a marketing team to prompt a basic consumer action: to buy your service or product.
This action is (or should be) tied directly to each and every one of your marketing efforts. Your marketing team, whether at an agency or in-house, needs to spur a level of engagement with your ads that then guides your target audience to the end of your conversion funnel. Seamlessly pull in your customers; don’t push them.
Let’s take a minute to go back to the world of classic print advertising where engagement was (and still is) a giant mystery. Your company could publish a magazine ad or even a giant print billboard and never know exactly how many people saw it—much less read it. With print advertising, there are zero analytics to guide your strategy.
To throw in some startup jargon (yes, more jargon–you know you secretly love it): the digital era has radically disrupted this advertising model. Not only do you know how many people are seeing your ad online, where they live, and what job they have, but, most importantly, you know how long each person stayed in front of your ad (or, curve ball, clicked on it. read: engaged!). Digital has truly revolutionized marketing for the better and made it more engaging for the consumer.
Bottom line: if you’re still relying on musings or print publication distribution numbers to determine the engagement of your various marketing strategies, you’re not setting your company up for success.

The numbers don’t lie.

Your marketing team has the opportunity to use the most engaging type of media on the most engaging medium platform: video on the web.
With online video, you can effortlessly track the number of people who are seeing your ad, where they live, what job they have, and, most importantly, exactly how long they watched the ad.
If you’re not quite convinced yet, let’s peel back the curtain on some of the incredible statistics on video:

• 89 million people in the United States are going to watch 1.2 billion online videos today.
• Globally, online video traffic will represent 55% of all consumer Internet traffic in 2016. (Cisco)
• Online video now accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic and up to 69% of traffic on certain networks. (Bytemobile Mobile Analytics Report)
• Online video users are expected to double to 1.5 billion in 2016. (Cisco)
• Only about 24% of national brands are using online video to market to consumers. (Kantar Media)

Wow. Did those stats just make you excited or was that just me? No, let’s be real — your jaw just dropped.

Visual storytelling is the key to engagement.

The analytics proving the successes of online video have really only uncovered what we already knew: storytelling is the key to fostering a memorable, emotional connection with an audience. As someone who has an undergraduate degree in History, I can confidently say this strategy works time and time again across the historical record.
Why do you want an emotional connection? A memorable, emotional connection is proven to optimize efficiency in your sales funnel. An emotional connection, and the memorability that comes with such a connection, requires relatable content. When two people experience the same emotions watching a video (you and your prospect), it opens a new, lasting connection based on trust and authenticity.
Engaging storytelling in video can take many forms. In the end, trusting someone who’s telling you a story you can relate to is human–no matter how hard you try, an emotional engagement is a reaction that happens naturally. Depending on the specifics of your company, you can connect emotionally with an audience and still get across a variety of messages.

Now, the fun part. Let’s see some examples.

1. The video that sells the emotions behind your product

In this video, our job was to create a video for Boston-based startup Project Repat. They’re a company that sells a rather common product these days: a blanket made of old t-shirts. Instead of creating a race-to-the-bottom by discussing the product quality itself, we got to the root of the product’s purpose: the emotional memories accompanying  each shirt. It’s pretty easy to explain the product itself in words — “it’s a beautiful t-shirt quilt made from all of your t-shirts.” Getting people to understand your underlying message — to truly feel the authentic value — is much more difficult to pull off. 

2. The video that opens the floodgates to your sales funnel

 

Backed Inc wanted to use its new lending platform to help millennials and recent graduates put down their first security deposit on new apartments.
At IndieWhip (the agency where I currently work), we commonly make videos to accompany the launch of startups. After choosing an initial target market, it can be very effective to make a video directly for your initial custom audience. Next, we make sure this custom audience sees a specific video by targeting that audience down to job title, age, and location on Facebook. With the case of this specific video, this strategy resulted in more than 120,000 views from Backed’s target market seeing this video within two weeks of the product launch.
Anyone, regardless of being stuck at home after graduation or not, can relate to the emotions in this video. Many of us have encountered the annoying younger sibling who steals the remote. And, for those who have not, chances are likely they’ve encountered their mother cleaning and, unfortunately, causing an interruption in the process. In the end, the perfect target persona for Backed has likely experienced both of these scenarios.
All in all, this video speaks directly to Backed’s ideal consumers and, as a result, effectively engages them.
Just in case you don’t believe me — how do we know this works? You’ll notice the “Call to Action” at the end of the video. Each person who clicks on this is trackable and entered into our sales funnel for further, specific remarketing.

3. The video that gives an overview of your company

For health product-based startup Maxwell Health, we made a video appealing to their varied target audience (after all, people of all ages can benefit from easier access to their healthcare information).
Rather than making a standard (boring) explainer video to give an overview of the specific functionality behind how the app works, we decided to appeal to the everyday use benefits of the app. People are more likely to remember how an app can improve their lives rather than the specific features. It was important show the value of the product within the context of the user experience. What matters is not necessarily the details of the functionality, but rather the ease and efficiency enjoyed by its users.

The time is now. Give video a try in 2016.

You’ll notice each of these videos is only around a minute and a half in length. That’s the ideal length. Otherwise, you’re more likely to lose your audience’s attention.
These videos can be used across multiple channels. If you’re in a space that still uses TV advertisements, go for it. Most startups, however, shouldn’t be spending that much  capital on such a wide demographic, especially when digital video deployment is so inexpensive.
Instead, we think it’s best to use video as part of a lean, mean growth machine. Ideally, your marketing videos live on a site like YouTube or Vimeo. If you want to be really edgy, you could even check out Wistia. They’re a growing startup out of Boston with a video hosting product. Wistia allows you to create customized calls-to-action, and provides you with detailed, easy to understand analytics for your videos. Of course, there’s also the VFA Fellow-Founded company, Slope. They’re an online platform that’s improving collaboration on video projects.
Video offers elastic boundaries for communication — the same, concise, relatable message can be stretched and shaped as a single video is played over and over again by millions of people. In a world where YouTube gets four billion views a day, the sharing and viral potential for your service or product in the form of a video is readily possible and achievable.
70% of all companies say video is the most effective tool in their marketing tool belt for 2016. Two out of three businesses will dominate their digital strategy with video — will you be one of those companies?

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Ready to take the plunge and make a video? Feel free to reach out to me directly if I can answer additional questions. Also, feel free to check out the VFA Company Partner I work for called IndieWhip.

Judy Bain is the proud parent of Lena Kelly, a 2014 Fellow in Cleveland. She recently retired as Vice President and General Counsel, Epson America, Inc. and is happy to answer questions about VFA from a parental perspective at judy_bain@yahoo.com. To read about how Lena fell in love with Cleveland, check out her blog post.

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Grad School Can Wait

I was looking for flights to college graduation when my daughter (VFA class of 2014) told me she was ending her job search and accepting an offer from Venture for America. “Since when did you want to become a teacher?” I asked. “No Mom, it’s Venture for America, not Teach for America! I’m taking a job at a startup in Cleveland.”
What?
Though I didn’t yet know it, that conversation marked the start of the best experience a parent could ever want for her/his recent college grad, so long as that young adult loves adventure, is a bit unconventional, is not afraid of reasonable risk, and has a fierce independent streak. If that describes your son or daughter, then read on.
Here’s what VFA is not: something that is easy to explain when your friends and family ask what your daughter is up to since graduation. “Yes, she did really well in college, but no, she didn’t take a position at a big company or consulting firm and no, she didn’t apply to grad school.” “Yes, you heard me right, she went to Cleveland and is working in a tiny startup.” “She’s a fellow in VFA,” I proudly claim and then spend the next 10 minutes expounding on what that means.
So, what is Venture for America?
From a parent’s perspective, VFA is a mini MBA, an urban social experiment, and an opportunity for personal coaching rolled into a two-year commitment. VFA is a way to guarantee amazing mentorship right out of college. It’s an organization that creates a tight-knit network of very bright, mostly athletic, go-getter types who aren’t motivated solely by big salaries. VFA recruits young people who want to take on more than a traditional job and learn how to build businesses from the ground up. Oh, and these kids move to cities that have seen better times because they want to help make those communities better.
By going to non-traditional jobs, VFA Fellows get to figure things out on their own and are better prepared for the challenges ahead, whatever those may be.
Andrew Yang and his VFA team are building another path for our best and brightest college graduates – but unlike the conventional path of grad school and consulting, the VFA path is uncertain and the benefit will not be in a big pay check (at least for the first two years out of school).
VFA is about challenge, hard work, and fun. It is about friendship and risk. It is about self-discovery and mutual support. It’s a path to a fulfilling future.
Since joining VFA, my daughter has met interesting, ambitious, and fun people at BoxCast, her tech startup. She has had to figure things out for herself, wear lots of hats, and work hard. But that alone is not what makes the VFA experience so great. As a kid from California with zero connections in Cleveland, being part of VFA gave my daughter an instant community of energetic and caring young adults who have provided her with a supportive network and booming social life. VFA has also has given her a platform to grow her Cleveland connections. Thanks to VFA, my daughter sat with the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers during their opening scrimmage (GO CAVS!), spoke before the Cleveland City Club, and continues to build relationships with leaders of the community.
The network of VFA fellows in different cities is also tight. The fellows reach out to one another, visit throughout the year, and attend a second round of training camp to further boost skills and build their network.
This year, I spent Thanksgiving with several fellows in Cleveland and saw for myself how much they care for one another. One of the fellows from Baltimore even sent my daughter homemade place cards for our Thanksgiving table. How’s that for a caring network of VFA friends?
Would I recommend it? Absolutely, for the right kid. VFA has figured out the profile of a good fit, and as a result, the VFA Fellows I have met in Cleveland are an incredible crew. I have no doubt that some of these Fellows will have great success in their professional lives and be leaders in their communities as a result of their VFA experience.

We are excited to bring you a two part interview with Sam Rosen, Founder & CEO of Makespace, a convenient, simple, on-demand storage solution and takes the “self” out of “self storage.” In the first episode, Sam chats with Jeremy about his career as a corporate banking analyst turned entrepreneur.

Click here to listen to Part I

In the second part of this exciting interview, Sam Rosen discusses why operations and logistics are so important to the success of his company MakeSpace, and why a company is best positioned when it is “high volume and low margin”.

Click here to listen to Part II

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This week, Jeremy chats with Russ Heddleston, CEO of DocSend. Russ graduated from Stanford University with a masters degree in computer science and, forgoing offers from major firms, joined Greystripe after graduation where he quickly became the Director of Engineering at 22 years old. After 3 years at Greystripe Russ went on to HBS with the intent of starting a company while in school and co-founded pursuit.com, a social referrals product to improve how companies source referral candidates which was acquired by Facebook. After helping to redesign Facebook pages and timelines Russ and some friends came together to start DocSend, a company that makes salespeople more effective by enabling them to track, control, send, and present sales materials with real-time document analytics. Download this week’s episode to learn more about Russ’s journey and how to craft the most effective pitch deck.

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Originally Published in Cambio Col[lab]

You did it! You’re done with exams and are headed home to sleeping in, holiday parties…and internship applications?

If you’re spending at least part of your winter break looking for an internship for next summer, you’re not alone – almost 40 percent of college students will have at least one work experience before graduating. Use these tips to help you get the best summer internship you can!

Ask yourself: What do you want to learn?

Ditch the stereotypes of coffee and copies. A good summer internship gives you an amazing opportunity; get away from the distractions of class, clubs and more to build skills in a focused way. To make the most of this chance to gain experience, start your search by asking yourself this basic question, so you know the purpose behind your summer internship: Do you want to build a particular skill, like coding or financial analysis? Are you interested in learning more about a particular field, like medicine, education or nonprofit work? Do you just want to see what it’s like to work full time? Tailor your search accordingly.

Use your networks and available resources.

Once you know what you’re looking for, talk to anyone and everyone with connections to companies or workplaces that you think you might have an interest in. Have you tried college career services, family, friends and school alumni, sorority sisters or past supervisors? Ask for email introductions, reach out on LinkedIn and talk to friends who have previously done particular internships. People who have done this before can likely also point you to resources relevant to your search. For example, many non-profit and social entrepreneurship-related jobs and internships are listed on specialized sites like Idealist and the B Corp Jobs Board.

Do your research – and know employers will, too.

Before writing an application or going for an interview, make sure you do your homework on an organization – who works there, what’s the mission and vision, what do they seem to really prioritize or need? They’ll be looking you up, too – you want to make sure that your online presence, from Facebook to LinkedIn, is in a state where you’d be comfortable with a future boss seeing it. If you write articles or keep a blog around topics relevant to your desired internship, get those updated and in a central location.

No position description? No problem!

Some organizations, particularly startups, non-profits or small companies, may not have formal internship programs or positions listed on their websites – but that doesn’t mean you can’t work there! Set up an informational interview with someone at the organization and ask about internships, or send along a resume and cover letter explaining what you think you could contribute. You might have to hustle a little harder to get in the door, but you might end up getting even more responsibility and experience if you’re working on a small team.
This applies to both getting the internship and getting paid. If an organization offers you a substantial internship opportunity but is unable to pay you, many colleges and service organizations have stipend funds that you can apply for. You never know unless you ask!

Don’t be afraid to get in deep.

An internship is a great time to learn a lot about how an organization works and try different things. At the same time, don’t be shy about really digging in deep to a particular subject matter and skill and owning a project. When interviewing, ask about what the expectations are for your work – can they name one or two substantive projects that you’ll be heavily involved in? If it sounds like they have a plan for you that is more directed than flitting from department to department, that’s a good sign. You want to be able to leave your internship and point to something substantive at your company that wouldn’t have existed without you and to skills you’ve learned that you could apply right away in another work setting.
Full-time work is a great chance to focus in – take advantage of it by finding an internship that will be really meaningful. Happy hunting!

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Name: Hetali Lodaya ’14
Alma mater: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ’14
Job: Communications and Community
Company: VentureLab, a startup non-profit developing entrepreneurship and technology education programs for K-12 students