Originally published by Andrew Yang on the Venture For America Forbes Blog. 

Brian Bosche and Dan Bloom were video guys who started TernPro in 2014, a company that sent GoPros to companies that needed content for their websites. They spent countless hours neck-deep in content, trying to make compelling videos out of hours of not-so-great footage. This meant having teams of people working on different tasks, like producing, editing and communicating with the client.

One day, Brian looked at Dan and said, “This is nuts. I’m using five different systems for project management, asset management, reviews, editing and communication. I find myself doing as much work trying to organize workflow as I do on the work itself.” Dan agreed and said, “Someone should really come up with a better system for this.”  That thought hung in the air for a while, and shortly thereafter, Slope was born.

Today, only two years later, Slope is a content production software company with a growing client list that includes Microsoft and Title Source. The way Brian and Dan got there carries lessons for entrepreneurs trying to build companies in niches everywhere.

Solve a problem you’re familiar with.

Brian and Dan had lived the problem and felt the pain point. Says Brian, “Every creative I knew was toggling between email, Basecamp, Dropbox and Wipster and then back again. Heck, half of them were just using Google Docs, spreadsheets and crazy e-mail chains.” Because they had such deep experience as filmmakers themselves, they understood how creative teams operated and communicated.

This helped them understand the product and communicate the product’s value to customers. “We knew what features would make our lives easier, and those are the first ones we built.” They also could speak directly to people who were running content production teams because they had done it themselves. “It’s a lot easier to have a conversation about the ins and outs of film editing when you’ve been in the editing room yourself for hundreds of hours.”

Find the right people and don’t get discouraged.

Brian and Dan shared a common vision for the product. But, neither Brian nor Dan was a software developer. “We knew there was a need, but neither of us could build it,” Brian says. They set about trying to find someone to join the team who could lead the product team. Their first two hires didn’t work out, and those two false starts took them about a year to sort out. On their third try, they found their man, Kyle Gostinger, who now runs a team of developers in their Seattle office.

“People sometimes thought we were crazy trying to build a software business when neither of us was a coder,” Brian says. “It took us a few tries and tons of networking, but we eventually found the right person. We just refused to give up.”

Understand that cash is king.

While they were going through months trying to build the product they imagined, the costs mounted. “The wrong hire is expensive — it’s not like anyone gives you your money back,” Dan said. “We were sinking money into trying to get this product off the ground and trying to raise money for our new company. But money rarely came in when we thought it would, so we just had to make it work.”

They continued to do video production work to pay the bills. “At the time, it felt like defeat that we were taking assignments just to keep the lights on. But we learned more about the production process with every project. Now, some of those clients are now Slope customers, partners and even investors.”

After launching in September 2016, Slope is now signing up new customers every day. “The most satisfying thing is when a team uses Slope and now can’t imagine going back to their patchwork of systems.” With Slope, the only direction Bosche and Bloom are heading now is up.

Originally written by Dylan McNally ’15, Patrick McAnaney ’13, & Andrew Lowenthal of Out in Tech on the Venture For America Forbes blog. 

Entrepreneurship and risk are a package deal, and launching a company as an LGBTQ person places yet another set of challenges on an already uncertain endeavor. A question such as, “Is my product-market fit secure enough to raise venture capital?” gives way to something more haunting: “Could my sexual orientation or gender identity limit how much funding I get from investors?” As a result, a young LGBTQ person might forego their innovative startup idea for a more secure job at a company that accepts, or even celebrates, their identity.

To help reduce career barriers for LGBTQ entrepreneurs and promote innovation around issues affecting the LGBTQ community, Venture For America and Out in Tech have  joined forces. Together, they are committed to building networks of LGBTQ entrepreneurs, promoting diversity in startup communities, and enabling more LGBTQ people to see entrepreneurship and tech as viable career paths.

Here’s why:

1. The data show real inequality gaps for LGBTQ people in entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship, especially in tech, has a well-documented problem with racial and gender diversity. Research on LGBTQ diversity is more limited – an issue in and of itself – but evidence suggests LGBTQ founders also face difficulties. A 2016 study by StartOut reported that 37% of LGBT startup founders in the United States did not come out to their investors, and LGBT-founded companies raised 11% less capital than a sample of their non-LGBT peers.

Companies in states and cities with anti-LGBT policies, as well as those founded by LBT women, were at an even greater disadvantage. Among study participants, LGBT founders were more than twice as likely as their non-LGBT counterparts to move their companies to more accepting locales like California, New York, and Massachusetts. Seventy percent of LBT women raised less than $750,000 of outside capital, while 47% of GBT men raised at least $2 million.

2. Strong networks provide better access to resources and investors.

Startup life can be lonely, and that isolation can be costly for new ventures. Research from Babson College on common practices of entrepreneurs highlights the need for “membership in physical communities where ideas can be shared and shaped.” Startup communities tend to offer good opportunities for productive collaboration like co-working spaces and meet-ups around shared interests. Even with the best intentions of inclusivity and acceptance, however, straight white men tend to dominate these circles and diversity remains elusive.

As a result, and due to the smaller proportion of LGBTQ people in the general population, the density of LGBTQ people in startup networks is low. This makes it tough to find a strong network of advisors, confidantes, and advocates. Building communities of LGBTQ entrepreneurs can help. Together, we can connect with each other and generate the social capital necessary to build customer bases, recruit top talent, and attract investors.

3. LGBTQ-supportive companies see positive outcomes for employees.

In many cases, corporate employees benefit from policies and employee resource groups that protect LGBTQ individuals from workplace discrimination and provide a sense of formal inclusion. A 2013 study from the Williams Institute finds that LGBTQ employees at supportive companies experience less discrimination, better health, and higher job satisfaction and commitment.
Startups, however, often lack the scale at which intra-company LGBTQ groups can be formed. Early-stage companies may only have a handful of employees, of which one or two might identify as LGBTQ. LGBTQ entrepreneurs can build formal networks to mimic the sense of community gained from such groups in corporate spaces and benefit from a heightened sense of well-being at work and in the broader startup community.

4. LGBTQ innovation helps companies solve problems and tap into new markets.

In 2015, LGBTQ Americans had $917 billion in collective buying power, on par with that of other minority groups. Of course, LGBTQ entrepreneurs themselves are uniquely equipped to develop new products and services tailored to LGBTQ consumers.
LGBTQ employees at Facebook listened to fellow LGBTQ users and advocated for custom gender identities on profiles. Her, a lesbian dating app, was developed out of the founder’s own frustration with using versions of other apps geared toward heterosexuals and gay men. The Out in Tech Digital Corps helps provide web services for LGBTQ activists and organizations around the world. A quick search for “best LGBTQ products,” however, reveals few results and lots of room for growth. Together, we can identify and tap into opportunities in our own market more effectively.

Diversity in company leadership also drives innovation. Research published in the Harvard Business Review found that firms with a diverse set of leaders are 45% more likely to report market share growth and 70% more likely to have secured a new market altogether. However, 78% of firms lack a diverse set of leaders, and LGBT employees at these companies are 21% less likely to win endorsement for their ideas.

5. Future generations of LGBTQ people should see entrepreneurship as a viable path to success.

Adversity is only one side of the story. In contrast to some LGBTQ people with careers in traditional organizations – financial institutions, school districts, corporate law firms, retail companies, etc. – LGBTQ entrepreneurs may have an easier time carving out paths for themselves without daily dealings with prejudiced bosses or coworkers. LGBTQ people should embrace entrepreneurship as a way to escape the old boys clubs and create their own inclusive work environments.

That being said, challenges persist. Venture For America and Out in Tech believe that the best way to resolve these issues is to encourage more entrepreneurship in the LGBTQ community. After all, embarking on an entrepreneurial endeavor and coming out as LGBTQ are easier with role models to admire. A similar sense of familiarity with LGBTQ people is also important for our straight and cis-gendered colleagues. Together, we can inspire future generations to prioritize gender identity and sexual orientation as assets and never as liabilities.

Originally published by Andrew Yang on Quartz.

Stephen Hawking says that “we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity” and that the “rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative, or supervisory roles remaining.”

Sam Hinkie, the smartest man in sports and a Stanford grad, asks, “How are you preparing your kids for a life with 60% unemployment?”

Sam Altman, the head of YCombinator, is so convinced that we’re going to need to figure out new ways of providing people with a means to live that he’s giving ~$20,000 each to 1,000 people in Oakland for a year just to see what they do with their new jobless income.

Literally the smartest people in the world think an unprecedented wave of job destruction is coming with the development of artificial intelligence, robotics, software, and automation. My friends in Silicon Valley have read the Second Machine Age and Rise of the Robots and they see a wave coming. The White House published a report last month that reinforced this view. Some of the headline stats:

• 83% of the jobs where people make less than $20 per hour will be subject to automation or replacement.
• Between 9% and 47% of jobs are in danger of being made irrelevant due to technological change, with the worst threats falling among the less educated.
• Between 2.2 and 3.1 million car, bus, and truck driving jobs in the US will be eliminated by the advent of self-driving vehicles.

Read that last sentence again: we’re confident that between two and three million Americans who drive vehicles for a living will lose their jobs in the next fifteen years. Self-driving cars are the most obvious job-destroying technology, but there are similar innovations ahead that will dislocate cashiers, fast food workers, customer service representatives, groundskeepers, and many many others in a few short years. How many of these people will be readily employable elsewhere?

Okay, you’re thinking. But isn’t this all still in the somewhat distant future, since unemployment is only 4.6% according to the headlines? Actually, automation has already eliminated about four million manufacturing jobs in the US since 2000. And instead of finding new jobs, a lot of those people left the workforce and didn’t come back. The US labor force plummeted by about 10 million during the same period, down to levels not seen in decades. The labor participation rate is now at only 62.7%, a rate right below El Salvador and right above the Ukraine.

Each 1% decline in the labor participation rate equates to approximately 2.5 million Americans dropping out. The number of working-age Americans who aren’t in the workforce has surged to a record 95 million, up almost 500,000 in the last month alone, with many of these being factory workers.

Yes, there are 95 million working-age Americans no longer in the workforce. The Great Displacement is already here and is set to accelerate.

High rates of unemployment are linked to higher rates of substance abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, depression, and just about every other social ill. Despair, basically. Note the recent spike in drug and opioid overdoses in the US. If you care about communities and our way of life, you care about people having jobs.

This is the most pressing economic and social issue of our time; our economy is evolving in ways that will make it more and more difficult for people with lower levels of education to find jobs and support themselves.

It’s a boiling pot getting hotter one degree at a time. And we’re the frog.

I run an organization, Venture For America, with the mission of helping to create 100,000 US jobs by 2025. We do this by helping growth companies access talent and training the next generation of entrepreneurs. We are taking some of the strongest young people in the country and saying, “Hey, use your talents to do some good and build businesses in Detroit, Birmingham, Baltimore, New Orleans, Cleveland, Philadelphia, or some other US city that could use a boost.” We’ve had some incredible success stories with people building multi-million dollar businesses that have hired dozens or even hundreds of people, including some low-skilled manufacturing workers.

We’ve trained over 500 aspiring entrepreneurs to work in eighteen cities around the US, and are now recruiting executives from Silicon Valley companies who want to help. We saw the decline in American entrepreneurship in markets around the country and resolved to do something about it.

I’m proud of everything that we do. But I feel increasingly like we’re working on islands of relative prosperity that are shrinking beneath our feet.

Every business will hire the very best people it can find—particularly startups. When our entrepreneurs start companies and expand, they generally aren’t hiring the down-on-his-or-her-luck-marginal-worker-in-need-of-a-break. They’re hiring the strongest contributors with the right mix of qualities to help an early-stage company succeed. The majority of the startup jobs that we’re helping to create essentially require a college degree. That excludes 68% of the population right there. And some of these companies are lifting further inefficiencies out of the system—reducing jobs in other places even while hiring its own new workers.

I’m reminded of a scene in The Hard Things about Hard Things, when Ben Horowitz meets with his two lieutenants. He says to one of them, “You’re going to do everything in your power to make this deal work.” Then he turns to the other and says, “Even if he does everything right, it’s probably not going to work. Your job is to fix it.”

That’s where we’re at. Unprecedented things are happening in real-time and starting to wreak havoc on lives and communities around the country, particularly on those least able to adapt and adjust.

We should do all we can to reduce the worst effects of the Great Displacement – it should be the driving priority of government and non-profits for the foreseeable future. We should invest in education, job training, apprenticeships, relocation, entrepreneurship, matching people to opportunities, tax incentives to hire – anything to help make hiring and retaining workers appealing.

And then we should assume that, for millions of people, it’s not going to work. Uber is going to get rid of its drivers as soon as it can. Its job isn’t to hire lots of people—its job is to move customers around as efficiently as possible.

One programmer, Labib Rahman, said to me recently that “any responsible technologist has to be for providing people a universal basic income to make ends meet.” He knows what’s coming.

Before long, we’re going to have to rethink the relationship between work and being able to feed yourself. And then figure out how to convey the psychic and social benefits of work in other ways.

It’s one reason why what Sam Altman is doing in Oakland is so fascinating and important. He’s basically piloting what the government should be doing so there will be relevant data when the need is too pressing to ignore. Many of my friends think that people will just chill out if you give them free money. I tend to think they’ll make the most of it and try to better themselves and their future. Sam is going to find out for all of us.

Will our jobless future look more like Star Trek or Mad Max? If you squint a little, you can see which way we’re headed.
As William Gibson says, “The future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.” The future of automation and job loss is right now.