By Carmine Di Maro, Detroit Fellow ’16

Every year in the United States, nearly two million bright-eyed students leave college and go in search of their place in the mysterious world of post-graduation.
Moving to a new city and adapting to a new way of life is heavy weight for anyone to carry. Sometimes it might seem like just managing your job, feeding yourself, and the occasional trip to the gym are as much as you can handle.
What if there were a way for you to meet friends, build your network, and contribute to your new community all in one fell swoop?
In fact there is… Community Building!
The broadness of this term is really where the beauty is.
There are infinite ways to add value to a new community and they lie at the intersection of the community’s needs and your passions.
Do you love prix-fixe meals and know that local chefs are looking for opportunities to showcase their experimental wares? All you need is a venue, a date, a chef, hungry people and you are in business my friend. Keep reading for Seven Ways to Build Community After College.

One. Host Dinners.

People love to connect over food and shared interests. Whether it’s an informal “family dinner” held every Sunday (a big one in VFA circles) or bringing people together to learn from an expert, dinners are an easy and fun way to build community. Some ways to take this to the next level are finding sponsors to pay for food (usually in exchange for being present at the event or other exchange of value), and finding one-of-a-kind venues like the time I had dinner in a 1920s-era safe under the city of Detroit.

Two. Host Meetups.

If you’re looking to get a bit more done than a dinner, meetups are great. In Detroit, Jon Schwartz (VFA ’17) and I ran an event called “How to Start a Startup” that brought people together from the local startup community to work on pitches, marketing and other problems that founders face. We invested a lot of time upfront to talk to other startup organizers in the community, secure sponsors, and lockdown a reliable venue. It wasn’t easy in addition to our day jobs, but the golden rule we kept in mind is that if you’re asking for people’s in-person time, then you owe it to them to make it worth it.

Three. Create Content.

Yes, it does seem like everyone you’ve talked to in the last month is starting a podcast. That being said, identifying a topic that will resonate with a certain group and adding value to them regularly still works wonders. Lauren Hoffman (VFA ’16 – Detroit) had barely landed in Detroit before launching her newsletter, Detropolitan, showcasing the best things to do, see, and eat in her new city. The important thing here is optimizing for your strengths and having a plan. If you’re a fantastic writer, but uncomfortable on video, invest in writing on Medium, LinkedIn, or local outlets. For a great start on making a content plan that actually adds value to people: click here.

Four. Make Introductions.

This one is predicated on the critical skill of listening. If you take the time to listen deeply to everyone you interact with in a day, you’ll be amazed how many times you pick up on people who should be talking to each other. I’m convinced that a tiny fraction of people take the time to make these introductions, and the world is a less connected place for it. 

Five. Volunteer at events.

I still talk to people from years ago that I met while handing out name tags at an event. If you’re trying to work your way into the local startup scene, demo day events for accelerators are always looking for volunteers and you’ll meet lots of investors and founders. This approach is also great for expensive events for fancy business people. $1K price tag for the big conference? Adhere that name tag and put your college shoes back on, because you’re running the door.

Six. Informational Interviews.

One of the true great secrets in life, the informational interview will open your eyes to the world beyond your day-to-day. Popular in college, but seemingly forgotten in post-grad, these low-stakes meetings are a way for you to network and learn about new things and opportunities. Use LinkedIn (or Instagram) to find people you want to learn from, work with, etc. and reach out. You’ll be surprised how many times you have a 2nd-degree connection on LinkedIn or a mutual friend. Just make sure you’re always respecting their time and finding ways to add value to them in the process of meeting. 

Seven. Work on Side Projects.

Stay in a constant state of exploration. I bet you’re filled with ideas. The first step in making an idea real is to go out and talk to people about it. If you’re really into film and want to make a documentary in your spare time, you can totally find the right people to talk to. And the right people will likely share your enthusiasm for making documentaries, maybe even become connections or… *gasp* friends. 
So fight that urge to go home and crash every day after work! Community building is a muscle that gets stronger with time and will imbue you with much more energy, connections, and fulfillment than one more season of Rick and Morty ever could.
 
Carmine is a 2016 Venture for America Fellow who lived in Detroit for three years before joining the VFA Accelerator to work on problems at the intersection of entertainment and wellness. You can reach him at carmine@carminedimaro.com

By Garrett Ransom ’17, Founder of Ravel Labs

On May 19, 2019 I witnessed history. I sat on the sacred lawn at Morehouse College’s commencement ceremony bantering back and forth with a friend throughout a huge chunk of the opening speeches. Out of nowhere, I heard a wild roar of applause overwhelm the entire campus. At first, I was clueless. Moments later, I realized that Robert F. Smith, an African-American billionaire and successful private-equity entrepreneur, committed to paying off the debt load for the entire Morehouse College Class of 2019. It was a special moment that led to many conversations with college friends and a lot of personal reflection.
At this point in time, I was still working at a distributed cloud storage company called Storj. The job gave me the most financial and professional stability that I’d had since walking across the stage at Mother Morehouse, as many alumni affectionately call my alma mater. The opportunity had also molded me into a data scientist with experience working at a startup creating disruptive technology. A time filled with lots of technical questions to my company mentors and lots of early morning study sessions to learn the rest on my own. But in the midst of the most comfortable moment in my short stint as an adult, when friends asked me about my career, I started to sprinkle in the fact that I was working on a building startup at the intersection of music and artificial intelligence.

The First Steps

Howard Thurman, an esteemed author and civil rights leader, delivered the commencement address for Spelman College in 1980. His core message was to follow “The Sound of the Genuine” within yourself. His words symbolized the importance of following your passion and your truth in all aspects of life, including career. Following the same ethos as Thurman’s speech, I started thinking about how I could combine my love for music and data science in late 2018. I fell across Google’s open source project Magenta and immediately knew that this was the type of work that I wanted to do over the next decade plus of my life. They were creating systems driven by artificial intelligence that were able to generate and transcribe music, and create new sounds. As a guy who grew up making beats on Fruity Loops, playing trumpet in the jazz band, and watching more music videos than movies, starting a company based on democratizing musical creativity felt like the most unadulterated career move that I could make. It was my “sound of the genuine.”
That led to the creation of Ravel Labs. I chose to do the validation challenge Q1 2019. Initially, I wanted to create an app that allowed the average person without a musical background to make music using artificial intelligence. I surveyed all of my friends and spoke to a bunch of folks on the phone to measure the viability of the idea, but by the end of the ValChal, I was unsure of where to go next. It seemed like an interesting idea for most, but I wasn’t convinced that the pain point was strong enough to build a business on.
Not too long afterward, the VFA Accelerator Info Session came around. I contemplated whether it would be worth it to attend the session. Even though I was really early on with Ravel, I figured that I might as well get some details on the program. That session led to me competing with myself to see how much progress I could make on the business before the final application deadline. I wanted to give it my all and see where I landed. Throughout the process, folks like Caroline Hatfield and Barry Conrad were extremely invaluable. I received lots of helpful feedback and began to chisel a wide vision down to something a bit more tangible. Luckily, I got into the program! The experience has been rock solid. “One day at a time” has been something that I tell myself constantly. Starting a business is hard, but focusing on what you can control each and every day makes it a bit less daunting.

Ravel Labs Today

After talking to my friends that record music, I realized that sound engineering was a huge pain point in the process of releasing music. It’s expensive to take a recorded song and turn it into a polished piece of music to be consumed by the masses. That’s where a sound engineer comes in. They rectify all the imperfections in a recording to create the most pleasurable listening experience for listeners. Decent sound engineers charge at least $100-200 per song and it can take years for an artist to learn how to engineer songs themselves. This leaves a lot of artists shelving quality music that could help them connect with their fan base. I wanted to find a way to build a tool that would empower those artists. My initial focus is to make software that allows hip-hop artists to engineer their own music. A platform that allows artists to make quality music at a more affordable price with less hassle. My competitors have already created genre-agnostic technology that provides mixed results; Ravel plans to differentiate by providing the best possible product for the most consumed genre in the world.
Right now, we’re a team of 1 (just me) and developing a minimum viable product (MVP). I’m currently collecting feedback from hip-hop artists on audio that I’ve mixed for them automatically using a set of algorithms I wrote using Python. Later down the road, this tool will turn into a real-time platform that allows artists to iteratively improve their mixes assisted by machine learning in the background.
Ravel’s biggest challenges now are on continuing to find ways to connect with our audience; balancing the zillion tasks of being a founder; and facing the uncertainty that comes along with building out the right founding team to make the road a bit easier.

Final Words

I have a few thoughts that help me daily. Follow your convictions; they usually lead you in the right direction. Be a doer, even when it hurts. Create stuff. Be self-aware (know thyself). Understand your strengths, weaknesses, what drives you, what you’re passionate about, and all else in between. Your actions should be tightly coupled with who you are as a person. Don’t do things that deviate from your “sound of the genuine”. And regardless of whether you’re at Square 1 or 50, always know and expect that if you put consistent work into your craft that you can become world-class.
But be patient. It won’t happen overnight.
Cheers!

By Alex Hilleary ’16, Co-founder of Gather

Co-founders can be a huge asset for any entrepreneurial endeavor. A good partner can offer complementary skills, dissenting opinions, and accountability to help move projects further. There’s also a camaraderie factor. When the going gets tough, it’s nice to have other people in the trenches by your side. Many experienced investors recognize the value of having a companion at the helm and won’t even look at startups with a single founder.

But finding the right person to co-lead your business is tough. The co-founder roadblock often stops many promising business ideas from reaching their full potential. It’s a daunting task for anyone, but the challenge is particularly difficult for young entrepreneurs with limited work experience and small networks.

I knew I wanted to start a business at some point. I also knew, when the time came, I would need co-founders to help push me forward. When I joined the Venture For America Class of 2016, I hoped the program would connect me to great ideas and great people to work on them. In the end, VFA provided the experience, space, and collisions I needed to break down the obstacles to finding a co-founder.

Here’s how our team of three came together.

Building working relationships in a startup environment

Through VFA, John Wetzel (another 2016 Fellow) and I moved to Cleveland and joined BoxCast, a live streaming company. At first, we didn’t work together much. John stuck more to the product and design side of the business, while I helped on the sales and marketing teams.

Over time we started to collaborate on cross-team projects. We developed a back-and-forth working relationship. John brought design-thinking, drive, and optimism to the table. I contributed curiosity, user empathy, and a critical eye. Together, we made a solid team.

We also began to recognize a mutual interest in the future-of-work. John and I were both curious about how remote and flexible work might reshape the workplace. We wanted to know the story behind the people who were crafting remote work policies at culture-focused companies.

VFA’s quarterly Validation Challenge was coming up, so John and I used the space to explore further. Over a couple of weeks, we interviewed over 40 people in the space. We continued our conversations after the challenge ended. Soon enough, we had a full-blown side project.

Tapping into a network of potential co-founders

After six months of customer discovery, John and I wanted to start testing a prototype product. People leaders were struggling with day-to-day communications and information collection across their growing teams. We thought we could build a tool to help solve the problem.

We tried to create our solution on our own but decided that we needed more help. To rapidly iterate on a minimum viable product, we wanted to have a fully-technical co-founder on the team. So we turned back to our best network— Venture for America.

We reached out to Brooks, a 2016 Fellow in New Orleans. John and I weren’t particularly close friends with Brooks at the start of the Fellowship, but throughout the two-year program, we visited each other’s cities. Separately, John and I had great interactions with Brooks on those trips.

We caught Brooks at a good time between jobs. He was excited about the future of the work as well and let us fly him up to Cleveland (in February 🥶) for a weekend hackathon to build on our product.

From the start, Brooks filled in the gaps on our team beyond his technical expertise. John and I shared a common experience over the previous three years. When it was only the two of us, we reinforced each others’ biases. With his separate work background, Brooks provided alternative perspectives that challenged our instincts. While John and I both tend to reach conclusions quickly, Brooks was good at providing new angles. Over the next two months, Brooks continued to work with us and eventually became our third co-founder.

Where we are now

John, Brooks, and I work on Gather full-time, tackling the challenge of maintaining a tight-knit, personalized company culture at scale.

Complementary skillsets— engineering (Brooks), design and product (John), marketing and sales (Alex)— empowered us to spend the most time working on the parts of the business where we bring the most value.

Together, we push each other to do better and support each other against the emotional lows in the roller coaster of startup life.

Final thoughts

Founder relationships lay the groundwork for everything you build.

Finding the right co-founders can be hard, but VFA makes it easier. Some of the most successful Fellow-founded companies started with a couple of Fellows working together on something they cared about.

Update: In 2022 Gather was acquired by ChartHop, and John, Alex, and Brooks are now all a part of ChartHop team.

[Detroit, MI] [June 2019]- Venture For America (VFA), a two-year fellowship program for recent college graduates interested in entrepreneurship and working in a fast-paced, innovative startup environment, announced that it will host its 2nd Annual Website Challenge in partnership with Rebrand Cities during its signature Training Camp program in Detroit this summer.

 
Last year, 28 local Detroit businesses participated in the Website Challenge, in which VFA Fellows helped those businesses create or improve their digital presence. For the challenge, the Fellows work in teams of 5 to 6 to build their websites. This year the challenge is open to small businesses across all 14 VFA cities. During the week of training, Fellows learn how to build websites through workshops featuring domain research, design, coding, and more.
 
“We set up the Website Challenge initially as a means for Fellows to learn transferable skills. By partnering with Rebrand Cities, we have been able to make it not just a learning project, but a tangible output that can positively impact a business owner and its existence in their city,” said Cris Landa, VFA’s Director of Learning.
 
Mario Kelly, the founder of B3l1ev3 Staffing Services, is one of those business owners who participated last year and was blown away by the impact this had on his business. “The website challenge took my business to a whole new level,” he shared. Shortly after his website went live, he got a call from PepsiCo who wanted to use his services to hire 20 people. “This took my company from grassroots to the next level. Without the website, I would have never gotten that [PepsiCo] contract,” he said.
 
Bryce Detroit from Detroit Recordings also had an overwhelmingly positive experience with this initiative. “Working with the Fellows was a really cool experience. Based on the nature of my company, which is a social enterprise, there is a social, cultural, political undercurrent to what I do, and it was refreshing to see young people who were so receptive to social enterprise. They wanted to learn more about my business impacts people,” he shared.
 
VFA and Rebrand Cities expect to see more success stories come out of this year’s Challenge. “46% of U.S. Small Businesses have no website. Our partnership with Venture For America and WordPress.com is designed to help local businesses participate in the digital economy and become visual when potential customers are looking for them,” shared Hajj Flemings CEO of Rebrand Cities. Members of the press are invited to cover the Challenge and the final presentations which will happen on the campus of Wayne State University. It will take place during the first week of July. https://rebrandvfacities.eventbrite.com
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About Venture For America
Venture For America has worked with more than 800 recent graduates to launch their careers and is currently placing Fellows in startups in 14 cities across the country. For more information on Venture for America, please visit: https://ventureforamerica.org.
 
About Rebrand Cities
Rebrand Cities is a global civic design partnership with WordPress.com founded by Hajj Flemings. Our audacious goal is to get 10,000 businesses online (1,000 from Detroit in our home market.) It is fueled by a multi-disciplinary collaboration with business owners, community stakeholders, and local governments to eradicate the digital divide.
 
Members of the press are invited to reach out to Carson Koser for more information: carson@ventureforamerica.org
Venture For America is creating economic opportunity in American cities by mobilizing the next generation of entrepreneurs and equipping them with the skills and resources they need to create jobs.

Eric Huang and Steven Mazur, cofounders of Ash & ErieEach year, Forbes publishes its annual 30 Under 30 list, naming the most innovative, ambitious, and hustling young entrepreneurs across the US and Canada. For the third time, we’re proud to announce that VFA Fellow Founders have made the cut!
This year, three 2013 Fellows have made the cut!

Eric Huang and Steven Mazur, cofounders of Ash & Erie, were featured in the Retail & Commerce category of the list. Eric and Steven met in Detroit during their Fellowships. After bonding over their shared desire to start a company and their frustrations with finding clothes designed for men of their stature, they joined forces to start their brand.
Ash & Erie makes clothes for shorter guys. All of their clothes are specifically tailored and tested to fit men 5’8″ and under. The two leveraged VFA Launch resources, like the Accelerator and Innovation Fund, to get the company going. After selling out inventory after each new product launch, they even won a deal from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank
Now the company is on track to pull in more than $1 million in sales this year! Read their story here.
 

After too much screen time left his eyes strained, David Roger set out to find a solution. As Founder and CEO of Felix Gray, David’s company is reducing eye strain one fashionable pair of glasses at a time. Their proprietary lenses filter blue light and eliminate glare, two common culprits behind eye strain. But unlike other light filtering glasses, Felix Gray lenses are completely clear in stylish frames and available with your prescription—so they look just like any other pair of eyeglasses.
To build the company, David participated in the Innovation Fund and received investment funding from the VFA Seed Fund. Now, Felix Gray is on track to do $14 million in sales this year. Learn more about David and see the full list of honorees here.

By Amy Nelson, CEO

Nine months ago, I took over as CEO of Venture For America, a national nonprofit that is mobilizing the next generation of job-creating entrepreneurs. The previous CEO was also our Founder, Andrew Yang. His were huge shoes to fill — Andrew had been named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship by the Obama Whitehouse, one of the “100 most Innovative People in Business” by Fast Company, and had written a best-selling book. I was his number two, mostly laboring in the shadows and with zero national awards to my name. It was terrifying and humbling to say the least.

While it’s too early to declare victory, Venture For America is on an upswing post transition: Our Fellowship applications increased 72% this year. Fundraising is up almost 20%. We have made major improvements to our team and our programs. I feel 1000% confident that we are resilient and poised for the future.

I’ve been asked a lot about how we did it — and had more than a few coffees where I’ve shared this story with other organizations in transition. I’m hopeful that our experience can help other organizations develop their transition playbook.

So, here’s how we did it, step by step.

Preparing for new leadership

Andrew and I had been discussing my potential future leadership of VFA since late 2015, but I never fully believed that he would move on. Even after he appointed me Managing Director of the organization in early 2016, and started slowly transitioning away from the day-to-day, I always saw him as our visionary and principal cheerleader. It took several one-on-one lunches in January 2017 for me to fully believe not only that he was serious about stepping down, but that he wanted me at the helm. 

Andrew then met individually with all our Board Members to break the news. Active internal dialogue broke out, but Andrew was very clear that he wanted me as his successor. I had more than a few lunches and calls with various Board Members throughout February, all the while keeping mum to everyone except my husband about what was happening. We put together a detailed presentation to the Board for their March 15th meeting, which made the case for my leadership, but also plotted out other options. 

That night, I joined the meeting and dutifully trotted in and out of sequestration to answer the board’s questions while they deliberated. They came to a decision on the spot, no need for further meetings: they believed I was the right person to lead VFA through the next chapter. Initiating a formal search for a successor, which was likely to conclude with the same result, risked creating uncertainty within the organization. They wanted to send a clear signal to the market that I had their full confidence.

Trust me, I’m still pinching myself here.

Communicating the transition

This was the most critical step in the process. VFA has a complex and highly dedicated group of stakeholders: our Fellows and Alumni, the startup partners who hire them, donors, and our team. Fortunately, one of our Board Members, Havas PR CEO Marian Salzman, is an expert in critical communications and she and her team dived in with a strategy that we were able to roll out swiftly and effectively.

We started with the VFA team, as they would be most affected by the news and could keep the information confidential. Andrew started by telling key team members individually once the decision was made, and then we did an announcement to the full team, including an overview of the communications plan. We later hosted a series of internal townhalls throughout the transition to keep the team up to speed and ensure radical transparency.

Donors, perhaps the most critical of our relationships, came next. We wanted all of our significant donors to know what was happening before a general announcement; so Andrew and I locked ourselves in a room for three days and had back-to-back phone conversations with more than 40 of our top supporters. Looking back on my notes from that time, their comments were a huge relief:

“This is an easy set of news to take in as a funder. It’s a logical progression. We couldn’t be more excited for you and for VFA.” 

“I’m glad you were able to grow the talent internally. I always prefer to see that type of transition in an organization…Let me know what I can do to support.”

“We would be happy to write a letter of support fully endorsing this transition that you can share with other donors.” 

Next up were Fellows and Alumni, and then broader partner and supporter community. We hosted two Town Hall style conference calls to make the announcement. More than 300 people joined them. Andrew was awesome: he shared his gratitude for all that we built at VFA, and then became my hype man. He gave me a ringing endorsement that left no room in anyone’s mind that this was anything short of the best possible outcome for VFA. I then spoke briefly about my vision for the organization, making clear that I valued continuity and had a deep commitment to our community. We had some Q&A, and did our best to ensure transparency and communicate how deeply we value the relationships we have built.

Finally, the big announcement — mass emails, personalized emails, a press release, and, thanks to Marian and Havas, some splashy press coverage. Notes of support poured in from all over. Longtime supporters reached out for lunch and coffee meetings. Things were in motion — now I just had to prepare for the big job.

Did I mention that all of this happened in the space of exactly two weeks? 

Using the transition period effectively

Once the cat was out of the bag, we had three priorities: elevating my profile, building out our leadership team, and setting a vision for my tenure.

Over the five months we had to transition, Andrew and I co-headlined more events than I can count: Fellow Selection Day, Training Camp, Alumni Reunion, Board Meetings. Most critical was our summer gala, where Andrew usually gave the “state of VFA” update. This time, he spoke briefly about his gratitude and then turned on the hype man charm. I shared my personal story with the audience, explaining why as a first generation college student from the Midwest, this work is close to my heart. In order to prepare for this big moment, I had taken on as many small speaking gigs as I possibly could in two months. (Seriously, I would show up to the opening of an envelope just to exercise the public speaking muscle.) It paid off — the torch was successfully and visibly passed.

Now, we had to fill the void that my move was making in the organization. I spent much of the month of June at the same coffee shop interviewing at least a dozen candidates for our COO role. The staff must have really wondered what I was up to after folks would come in and out all afternoon. But this hire was critical. We found perhaps the world’s only child actor – turned astrophysicist – turned entrepreneur, and he has been a foundational asset to me and all of VFA.

Finally, the vision: we had engaged a wonderful nonprofit consulting firm, Community Resource Exchange in January for a full-blown strategic planning process. While it might have seemed crazy to engage in this very rigorous process amidst so much change, it turned out to be completely fortuitous. While it was by no means easy doing all the stakeholder analysis and building consensus on our committee, we were able to make our Strategic Plan public on my first official day as CEO. We blasted it out to the community and hosted virtual town halls the following week to present it and take questions (trust me there is nothing weirder than speaking to an audience of hundreds on the phone when you can’t see their faces and they are all on mute.) But speaking into the void paid off, and the positive comments regarding our new direction far outweighed the critical ones. 

Making progress

Once I was officially CEO, I set off on a tour of all the cities where we worked and a few others where we raised money. I’ve traveled every single week over the last nine months, but the facetime I have had with our community has been invaluable. Seeing the impact our Fellows are having on the ground gives me fuel to keep going, and showing up consistently telegraphs to the cities how serious VFA is about our partnerships there.

The main job of a nonprofit CEO is fundraising. This is a day-in, day-out activity that can be mentally and spiritually exhausting, no matter how much you believe in the mission. In the early days, Andrew performed pure alchemy: raising millions of dollars on little more than a vision and a promise. In the seven years since, we’ve built an incredible development team to keep the fundraising machine churning. But even with a phenomenal team, donors want to engage with the principal. We have seen results because, frankly, I’ve had something to prove. I’ve asked longtime supporters to increase their commitments — and they’ve said yes. I’ve recruited new Board Members with incredible resumes. And, perhaps most exciting, I put out a reverse-RFP to funders for bids to bring our Training Camp to a new city. We got multiple competing offers and ultimately raised $1 million in new money to relocate the program to Detroit.

One last thing that I’m proud of — we not only had a surge in applications this fall/winter, but we had record numbers of women apply to VFA. While I’m not doing the hard work of on campus recruiting, I’ve been a vocal advocate for women in entrepreneurship, and I believe that the example of my leadership made our Fellowship even more appealing to many young women. I’m excited to welcome our first ever majority-female class to VFA next month!

Still learning

There is still so much left to do. We have ambitious goals and a lot of work ahead of us. But in retrospect, there are a few things that I think helped us make it through the transition.

1. Leaning on experts – I mentioned the tremendous efforts of Havas and Community Resource Exchange above, but throughout the process the Board leaned on publications, attorneys, and experienced folks on other Boards for advice. This was critical — you can’t go it alone.
2. The “Hype Man” — Andrew constantly reinforced his confidence in me — both publicly and in private. The week after the Board’s decision, we had a critical, very sensitive decision to make, and he and I did not agree on the right call. He told me unambiguously that it was mine to make, and then stood behind me with the board to get it done. I’ve heard time and time again of Founder’s not being able to let go, but while it was not easy for Andrew, he gave me full ownership and permission, no meddling, and I am hugely grateful for it.
3. Growing from the inside — Not every organization will have the right internal candidate, but for us, building up the bench has been critical to our success. I’m continuing to elevate leaders who I think have what it takes — just like Andrew did for me.

This post originally appeared on Technical.ly Philly by Roberto Torres.

Why Philly is Venture for America’s biggest city

 A robust tech and entrepreneurship community in an affordable, well located mid-Atlantic city has made the Venture for America (VFA) program — a two-year fellowship program for recent college graduates — thrive in Philadelphia: out of the 15 U.S. cities where it has dropped a pin, Philly has grown to become its biggest operation since launching here in 2013.
Per the New York-based organization, the program has welcomed 100 fellows in Philly over the past five years, placing them at startups and small businesses across the city. Each year, the program welcomes around 40 new fellows from across the country. Some 50 local startups have hired Venture for America fellows, and there are 30+ alumni still living in Philadelphia following their time as fellows.*
It’s why the organization decided to host its 2018 Northeast Job Fair at Philly’s Pennovation Center. Happening Friday, April 13, the event will help 90 fellows from the Class of 2018 connect with 70 startups based in Philadelphia and other cities.
“I’m delighted to be hosting VFA’s Northeast Job Fair in Philadelphia,” said Keenan Corrigan, VFA’s Philly director. “Philly’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is robust and this fair is a fantastic way to showcase our city, our companies, and our supporters to the next class of VFA Fellows.”
Prior to starting their new jobs, fellows spend five weeks getting training and professional development from entrepreneurs and industry leaders.
“There, they learn from experts, entrepreneurs and industry leaders so they are ready to add value to their startups from day one,” the organization said in a statement. “Then, fellows spend two years working at their startups, serving as core team members while learning first-hand how to contribute to a growing company and ultimately helping entrepreneurs in cities like Philadelphia expand and scale.”
Ask Corrigan why the program has expanded here faster and she’ll roll out similar arguments to those found in Philly’s bid for Amazon’s second headquarters: great location and pricing with a rich culture.
“It has to do with how affordable Philly is and the quality of life here,” said Corrigan, a Duke grad who has helmed the Philly VFA chapter since May 2017. “It’s low-cost, it’s close to New York and D.C., but there’s access to great culture, food, restaurants and things to do.”
Support organizations for entrepreneurs, both for-profit and nonprofit, also give fellows a path forward after the two-year period lapses.
“There’s a really strong entrepreneurial system here,” said Corrigan. “They know that they’ll have access to support organizations, resources, incubators and accelerators if they choose to start their companies here.”
—
*We were curious for an updated list of Philly-based startups founded by VFA alums. So here it is:

• LeagueSide (hired three VFA fellows in 2016 and 2017)
• NaturAll Club (founder Muhga Eltigani was recognized in the Forbes 30 Under 30 last year, hired two fellows in 2017)
• Magnolia (hiring two fellows in 2018)
• Philly Makerhouse
• Synotrac (2016 Dreamit portfolio company)
• Potluck
• Emile
• Compass (no longer in business)
• Doze (no longer in business)
• EagleEye

This post originally appeared in FastCompany by Elizabeth Segran
 

Too much screen time? This eyewear startup may have a $95 solution

Spending so much time in front of screens is hurting our eyes. According to The Vision Council, a full 60.5% of Americans report experiencing the symptoms of digital eye strain, which include dry eyes, headaches, blurred vision, and neck and shoulder pain.

A direct-to-consumer eyewear startup called Felix Gray wants to solve the problem. Taking a page from Warby Parker’s playbook, the company sells eyewear starting at $95 online. But unlike Warby’s lenses, Felix Gray’s is equipped with proprietary lenses that filter blue light and eliminate glare, which are two culprits of eye strain. Until now, eyewear specifically designed to protect the eyes from digital strain had yellow lenses and were particularly popular among gamers who spend extended periods of time in front of their computers.“Our innovation was creating lenses that are clear, so the glasses look exactly like any other pair you might find on the market, but you’re assured that you’re protecting your eyes from the negative effects of screens,” says David Roger, one of the cofounders of the brand.

Felix Gray launched two years ago with non-prescription lenses. Over the last year, the brand has been beta testing the prescription eyewear with people at various companies, who had the option of buying them at the end of that period. The majority of people ended up buying them. “Most of us don’t really understand how screens are affecting our eyes and bodies until we wear protective lenses,” Roger says.While the company could license its lens technology to other brands, Roger says the founders have no intention of doing so and they are focused on growing the Felix Gray brand. In a fun twist, Felix Gray’s seven frame styles–Turing, Nash, Faraday, Roebling, Jemison, Hopper, and Kepler–are named after inspiring scientists and mathematicians.

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.

When Carley Roney and David Liu got married, they had a seat-of-the-pants celebration on a sweltering Washington rooftop. They never planned to go into the wedding business, but soon saw an opportunity in the market for a fresh approach to wedding planning. In 1996, they founded The Knot, a website with an irreverent attitude about “the big day.” The Knot weathered the dot.com bust, a stock market meltdown, and eventually grew into the lifestyle brand XO Group, valued at $500 million. PLUS for our postscript “How You Built That,” how Michael Dixon’s business, Mobile Vinyl Recorders, uses portable record lathes to cut vinyl at parties, weddings, and music festivals.
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This article originally appeared on Quartz.

By: Amy Nelson, CEO at Venture for America
 
I have a lot of student debt. More than $250,000 worth, in fact, even though I graduated more than four years ago. I have so much student debt that until recently my monthly payment didn’t even cover the interest.
 
How did I get here? In 2011, I entered NYU’s Stern School of Business with a significant scholarship, but also as a single mother of two, a first-generation college student, a former Pell Grant recipient, and the kind of striver that our national parlance loves to embrace, but our systems fail to actually support. So I piled on the debt because it was easy to access and I had mouths to feed. I told myself it would all be worth it in the end.
 
Now, I’m not so sure it was.
 
These days, I’m the CEO of a national nonprofit and make way more money than my parents ever did— but not nearly as much as many of my MBA classmates. I fork over a ton of cash every month—far more than my mother’s mortgage payment—toward this heap of student debt, and yet the balance grows. My anxiety about this is lower than a few years ago, mostly because I’ve gotten used to it, but my credit score is so low that I may never be able to buy a home even though I’ve never missed a payment on anything in my life.
 
Business school is a great idea if you think that you want to work in one of three fields: investment banking, consulting, and brand management. These are fields that are otherwise nearly impossible to break into, and they will likely pay sufficiently well that the investment in an MBA will be net cash positive in the long-run. Business schools know this and tailor their calendars, processes, and sales pitches to these industries. If that’s you, go sign up for an MBA today.
 
But more and more schools are pitching themselves on entrepreneurship and social innovation, and pursuing those careers by entering business school is not only a bad deal for students, but a dangerous one.
 
These are fields that require a high-degree of risk tolerance and frankly are very difficult to teach well in a classroom environment. When business schools suggest they prepare students for these careers, it is purely a marketing play: there are no real incentives for MBA programs to change when Sallie Mae, Morgan Stanley, and BCG are their biggest underwriters. There is nothing about credential-seeking that strikes me as entrepreneurial.
 
Unless students are already wealthy, the resulting debt of business school may actually kill their chances of becoming an entrepreneur.
 
Debt constrains choices. When the average Wharton or Sloan graduate is saddled with six-figures of debt, it’s no wonder that new business formation is at 40-year lows, What’s worse, fewer and fewer people under age 35 aspire to ever own a business, and many of them directly cite debt as the reason.
 
Student debt is one of the biggest barriers to entrepreneurship and innovation in the United States, and instead of finding solutions to this problem, we are doubling down on a broken system. We have more than 1.3 trillion in student loans as a nation, and most graduate school loans have interest rates north of 7%—nearly twice the prevailing mortgage rates, despite the fact that student loan debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy but a mortgage can. Tuition only continues to climb, and more and more of our national budget is dependent on student loan revenue.
 
Now, I am really, really lucky. If I stay the course, the federal government is set to wipe away my loan balance six years from now. But there’s some uncertainty on this front. It seems that this program is going away—which is going to push the best doctors into for-profit hospitals, lawyers out of public interest law, and folks like me into management consulting. The opportunity cost in public service is huge, but in many ways I’m more worried about for-profit entrepreneurship.
 
Entrepreneurs are our job creators, and our national myth-makers. Our baby-boomer parents took the leap, but we millennials are shying away. They didn’t face the massive costs of education we do, and they had major supportive institutions to help them get there. The United States need a large-scale national investment in new business creation, or it will cede major ground to China and even Sweden.
 
 

January 14, 2018
By Amy Nelson, CEO & Laila Selim, Director of Talent
When Venture for America began our Fellowship program in 2012, we had a fairly narrow set of criteria for who could become a VFA Fellow. One had to be a recent college graduate (no more than 2 years removed from school) with a GPA above 3.0, have no felony convictions, be a US Citizen or permanent resident. We modeled these guidelines off of our peer institutions who had years of experience building fellowship programs.
Today, we have eased or modified essentially all of these restrictions. We have found that Fellows with some experience add significant texture to our cohort. Although the positions we place Fellows into remain entry-level, we are exploring pathways for more senior recruits. It turns out that one’s college GPA is at best a remote proxy for their ability to succeed as an entrepreneur – and that the excellent syllabus followers may not be best suited to operate in highly ambiguous startup situations. The “ban the box” movement made clear to us that those convicted of minor drug crimes – or those working hard to turn their life around after incarceration – face structural prejudices in hiring that functionally eliminate their chances of pursuing careers in many professions. So we nixed that restriction too.
But perhaps the most insidious of these requirements was that Fellows must be US citizens or green card holders. Our logic was straightforward: we work with startups who don’t have the bandwidth or wherewithal to sponsor work visas. The H1-B process is complicated and dominated by large, sophisticated firms who snatch up a shrinking number of available slots. Amy has seen it firsthand, as her husband is on a work-sponsored visa. Laila grew up in Cairo, the daughter of an Egyptian and an American. Surrounded by children from dozens of countries, the true value of an American passport only became clear when she came to college in the US. Our small organization and our partners were ill-equipped to navigate this field on our own; so we closed the door to this set of potential applicants.
But then, a few things happened. A resourceful young woman with a Turkish passport willed her way into getting a visa, taking on the legal costs herself. As a small nonprofit, the costs associated with visas are an enduring barrier. We gladly accepted her into our program. More exceptions sprung up, and we eventually realized that we had been missing out on an entire category of highly ambitious and incredibly talented young people: the Dreamers, or students with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, status.