Blog

At the end of 2017, VFA shared that we would not be expanding to any new cities in 2018, and that we intend to grow cohorts in our current cities to 10+. With this goal in mind, we are also no longer going to place new Fellows in three cities: Atlanta, Denver, and Nashville. This brings our total number of cities in 2018 to 15.
We made this decision in line with the goals and the framework we established in the VFA Strategic Plan. We want to focus our work on cities with a strong need for talent attraction and job creation, an existing entrepreneurial ecosystem, and a path to fundraising sustainability. Based on our experience over the past six years, we had the sense that some of our cities did not meet these criteria, and that our program was not as successful in those places as a result. We engaged a pro bono team of quants at Barclays to run a detailed analysis of all VFA markets (including comparative data from the top 50 metropolitan areas in the country) and their results confirmed our intuition: these three markets are not struggling to attract talent and create jobs. There was not a clear path to achieving our mission; so we decided to increase focus to places where we can fulfill those objectives.
We remain firmly behind our current Fellows and Alumni in these markets. They will retain full access to all VFA programming, including Launch resources. Our team will continue to provide support to Fellows in those cities. We are proud of what our Fellows are accomplishing at places like Guild Education, Stratasan, and Search Discovery, and we are excited to see what they continue to build. We are incredibly grateful to all who have supported our work and hired our Fellows.
We see this as the natural outgrowth of being a startup: we tried a lot of things in the early days, we learned, and now we know what the criteria are for us to achieve future success. We can act on that. Having fewer cities going forward means that we can do a better job in the markets where we are now focusing. We will be able to bring larger cohorts, improve the Fellow experience, and build deeper relationships.