Industry sign banking new hampshire ppt easy
each year Microsoft Research hosts hundreds of influential speakers from around the world including leading scientists renowned experts in technology book authors and leading academics and makes videos of these lectures freely available I am Michael Magali and I'm very happy to to have the opportunity to introduce Andrew yang today Andrew and I met a few weeks ago or a month and a half ago down in New Orleans where we were both at New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week and Andrew is the the CEO and founder of venture for America as you know previously he was the CEO of Manhattan gmat the the GMAT prep course that he then sold to to Kaplan and had kind of a realization that what he really wanted to do was to enable entrepreneurship and to in order to do that he began venture for America and I think that it was Peter Drucker who said the most entrepreneurial thing you can do is start a university Andrews kind of flipped that on its head and and and and said well actually what he's gonna do is work to make American universities more entrepreneurial or more make the graduates of those universities more entrepreneurial and so so happy to have him here today please welcome me in giving Andrew a warm welcome thank you so much for having me uh how familiar are you guys with venture for America unlike so raise your hand really high if you know everything about it and then like like not at all if you know very very little all right a lot of not so much so venture for America as Michael suggested a little bit is meant to address this problem and it's a problem I was talking with Tim about in the back it's a problem that maybe some of you have thought deeply about and some of you have thought absolutely nothing about it's that if you're a young smart person the United States today the odds of you becoming an investment banker management consultant or like like I was a corporate attorney the odds are pretty high and it if you want to do something like startups or anything else then the odds are actually a little bit low so how many of you guys have actually had a thought like this at some point ever all right a lot of you which is unsurprising to me because you guys in my mind represent industry an innovative industry in the form of Microsoft so you guys actually build you know incredibly valuable tools that help other businesses come into being so you guys in my mind are over here in the extreme left unlike a good end and then over on the far right is what a number of people are doing and is not it's not a knock on them because we all went to school with them or we were them in some cases I graduated from Brown anyone aside from Michael and me graduate from Brown no one disappointing so I graduated from Brown in the mid-90s and had no idea what to do and so I went to law school how many one do that good a lot of a lot of dodged bullets in this room so so I went to law school at Columbia found Law School clarifies it's very little about what you want to do and so I became a corporate attorney in New York doing banking and M&A transactions at a firm called Davis Polk and Wardwell and so I resemble this and so I understood how this came about so just to run through some of the numbers if you graduate from Harvard in 2012 there were generally speaking six default paths for you financial services law school management consulting medical school and graduate school Teach for America Teach for America had 4% of 2012 Harvard grads become corps members and about 14% apply then after that you have nonprofits government military media arts sports communications industry and IT is where you guys fall Microsoft and then undecided traveling was 13% so I joked that they went found themselves then come back and apply to law school or become management zones so so the the industry IT side if you were to try and suss out how many Harvard grads went to startups it's a sliver of a sliver it would be like a subset of that 10% so how do you guys go to Harvard I've been a few of you also none so first is this surprising unsurprising familiar to you unfamiliar like shocking totally not shocking see someone smiling what's your name sir oh it's thinking you Stephen yeah yeah see so yeah you're smiling because this is totally what you expected or yeah I'm aware of this my son is number of your BFA so that's why it Wow that's incredible what's your son's name right oh yeah yeah bride's a good guy yeah well no wonder you raise your head so much so so someone else someone who found this stuff totally like unsurprising anyone anyone yeah I graduated like a year ago like today pretty much actually and I'd say felt like 90% of my friends even felons of Finance or management consulting is struggle to think about any other option that was equivalent to something that would make them successful after graduation so I'm very familiar with this phenomenon and you went to a Duke yes yeah anyone else you just give me a show hands if you said yes this is totally unsurprising and you know you are there went through this yourself or no people are going through it like the vast majority of us and so it wasn't just me so in my case I went to law school out of brown but if you look at the other schools like Duke or Cornell or Columbia or Penn so it's not just a Harvard thing if you look at any of the top schools you see patterns among the top employers and the paths that they take where these six default paths really end up being the paths of least resistance for national university graduates around the country I'm sure some of you guys went to these schools I'm gonna stop with the school thing though all right so now what does this mean regionally so if you have a hyper concentration of smart young people heading to banking long consulting where does that mean they they move after college like where did all your friends go it was a Steven right yeah yeah so New York's one where else suit gun rally San Francisco Boston Chicago would be 5 or 6 DC LA so they had the top for our New York San Francisco Boston DC CH cagonu la are five and six now if you look at the rest of the country you a bunch of states with difficulty generating new businesses and creating jobs in those regions and they're essentially non-overlapping with the talent destinations with the exception of California which is so massive that can can have big problems in addition to having some pockets of prosperity and so if you're a smart young person from a state like let's say Georgia and you went to Duke with Stephen the odds of you heading back to Georgia and starting a business or working in a growth company they're really really low the odds of you becoming a banker consultant or lawyer in New York and DC very high and if you do this for a couple of decades you end up with an economic picture that looks something like this adventure of America we kind of joked that smart people are doing six things in six places they're becoming bankers kassadin's lawyers doctors academics or teachers in New York San Francisco Boston DC Chicago LA so what do you guys think of this picture first well is this surprising we're you guys familiar with this thoughts response yeah yellow-star I think the planet would it has it has yeah Atlanta does get a lot of talent from the southeast part of the US and if we were to look at the talent in migration numbers I think you're right it would probably be like top 12 in the country it's just the the yellow stars are actually statewide job creation numbers that's a good observation so this picture one you know just numerical I mean those are just where states don't don't have as many employment opportunities but I think there's a picture we're all familiar with having gone to a number of institutions that funnel like with with Stephen and Duke a disproportionate number of graduates to a select number of cities and I'm not sure where Seattle falls in terms of this discussion and I feel like you guys are like like right after Chicago in LA at least in my mind it's like and then it'd be like Seattle and Austin would be like the next level against it see some nods there so I thought it was like this you guys be like you know top three it's one of those like this all the time so so why is it then that so many young people do the same handful of things like what does this list list look like why is it that so many of your classmates end up becoming management consultants even though they probably had no idea what management consulting was when they they showed up on campus so factors so money is certainly a big one but Teach for America is shown that money isn't necessarily the primary driver all the time but money is certainly on this list what else is on this list prestige what's your name Aki Aki yeah so prestige certainly there what else keep going yeah game skills training get experienced because most seniors and college don't think of themselves as ready they want to go to an environment that's gonna help make them ready stability numbers are driven by those companies that create market for this University's crew so you are JP Morgan Chase Terry Lynch's of the world those of universities universities that they recruit from which then begins to drive that what what's your name iris iris so iris said something that you need to mark many of you guys are agreeing with which is that a lot of its influenced by which companies spend time and money recruiting and so that's certainly like a huge factor clearly marked path easy to find or apply to so it's prestige it's progress seeking the next level it's opens doors keep options keep options open so Stevens friends at Duke a lot of them weren't making what they think of as lifetime commitments they're saying look I'll do this it'll look great on my resume and then the world will be my oyster and that's something that banks and consulting firms obviously sell pretty heavily money compensation lifestyle gain skills training for the next thing community make sure you don't fall behind peers work with other smart people and then there's this notion of doing something that's good pro-social like Teach for America though this also applies to people who become investment bankers and management consultants because the thought process is that they need to gain stature and become a baller before they can really do any good it's like I will you know make lots of money and then I'll go back to the people with loaves of bread from horseback so what do I think of this list yeah so this has been road-tested if you will on campuses around the country and thousands of young people and they all say thumbs up this is why we do what we do and certainly you know when I went to law school I think it was some blend of these factors so on the flip side who's not getting the talent the the companies that are coming of age or getting started in cities around the country aren't really there at Durham to compete first even in his classmates and the the structural impediments one as iris said you're not being recruited because the startup is not going to come on campus six months in advance and start trying to recruit dozens of people to it's hard to find a suitable company if you did decide to look you you're doing it alone you have unclear prospects for training advancement or success you have no network idea of money or tech proficiency you just don't think you're ready and so for most young people they say look I'd love to join a startup I'd love to be an entrepreneur someday but first I need to go learn about business and then I can double back later down the road after I've gained some skills steven is this an accurate description of those of your friends that might have an interest in entrepreneurship that came out of Duke yeah so these are the structural problems and I'm gonna go on a limb and say if we can help address these issues then we can do these young people a great service as well as they're the country the economy if we can balance the scales because what iris was suggesting is a hundred percent right about the resources being employed recruiting our young people so Teach for America has pointed the way and the question I'm going to ask and then hopefully we can answer over the coming years is what would happen if the same proportion of talent that's currently heading to Wall Street professional services management consulting was instead going to startups around the country to Baltimore Cleveland Detroit New Orleans Cincinnati Las Vegas Philadelphia to startups in all these cities how long would that take to impact the rate of job growth and innovation nationwide like if we just reformat the numbers and say hey guess what this year 50% of Harvard grads and you know Duke grads or whomever tend to startups how long would that take to have an impact so I hear one year you said yeah thirty years thirty years yeah so the the over/under is somewhere in that range I would guess say it's a it's somewhere between one and thirty you know so but one thing that no one here doubts is that it would work like we all know it would work and really that the question is you know why don't we just make it happen and the reason why we don't make it happen is in part as IRA said a resource question so Teach for America had its genesis 24 years ago and this past year it had 50,000 now how do you guys had friends who - Teach for America first of all a number of you and so I came you graduate from Princeton last year yeah so so how many of your friends are you said you had a friend news during Teach for America yeah sure Nellie you know in LA yeah yeah so do you know anything about how she got how she became aware of Teach for America Wendy Kopp the founder into our schools she's pretty famous on campus and I think everyone was talking about it on campus I when it came to applying for jobs and what they were gonna do next that's more sort of like word-of-mouth I would say yeah so Teach for America is very well established on campuses but Teach for America also spent 38 million on recruitment and selection in the last year record so it's an expensive process trying to recruit young people and for that 38 million they got 50,000 applicants for 5,000 spots so that's how you become the sixth default path for young people's you spend tens of millions I have friends who are in financial services recruiting and they say they spend in and out an analogous amount on recruiting people at Duke and other campuses nationwide so what's going on right now is there's an arms race like a stealth arms race for smart people in this country where some sides are fighting and some sides are not now Microsoft is fighting because you guys are enormous and you say hey we need smart people so so let's go get them the startups cannot really fight that fight because they're out of the way they don't have the resource don't have the brand equity even if they went to campus they would lose because they were like hey I'm some company who never heard of our less money and higher risk like you know who's into that and you know most people would say you know that's okay Deloitte has a giant display right next to you like let me let me go talk to them which is not a knock on anyone involved it's just everyone's doing something very rational so so to fast forward a little bit for me so I became a corporate attorney in 99 and left in 2002 started calm in the first bubble you guys remember the first bubble where we guys all know you guys were here during the first bubble probably like awesome a few of you so so the first bubble was excellent wasn't it there's a good times so so I started a dot-com at the age of 25 raised a couple hundred thousand dollars and launched this site we got a lot of press from the New York Times USA Today CNN and then the bubble burst and then no one cared about my little calm Nasdaq went from 5,000 to 2000 you know our investors were worried about losing you know their mainstream investments much less their little angel investment in my company and so my company crashed and burned I was 26 I just lost people a quarter million dollars I still owed a hundred thousand in law school debt and my parents were like what the heck happened to you like you know didn't you used to be smart and and so I was trying to answer that question and I
said you know what I tried to start a business it didn't work out but I found that process much more genuine and invigorating certainly than being a corporate attorney was and so I said I need to get better I need to get stronger and so I'm going to ask you guys what would you advise 26 year old Andrew who had just started a company and failed that wanted to get better at that process of building a business what would you say to that person to do do it again so I felt like doing it again was gonna be tough because I just lost these people as money and you know 2002 and no one want to invest in anything and you know it's kind of broke so but I won with you like so so if you can't start a company again what might you advise or if you if I were to say to you hey that's like a bridge too far for me right now join a start-up which is what I did so I became the vice president of something-or-other at a tech company there's rampant tail inflation in startups you guys know that right well if you didn't know that now you know so um so I found someone who was more experienced than me and I knelt and said like please accept my sword master and he said rise and like knighted me and then and I became his sidekick for four years so that company raised five million dollars and went to several million in revenue I then became as Michael indicated the CEO of a test prep company called Manhattan GMAT which taught people how to do well on the GMAT I believe in very obvious names and so that company grew to become number one in the US and I personally taught the analyst classes at Goldman Sachs McKinsey JP Morgan Morgan Stanley and these other firms how to do well on the GMAT so I joked that I went into these incredible office buildings with beautiful conference spaces and I was like let's talk about triangles because like you know whatever whatever the no the week was about like a you know it seemed like a lot of overkill but that company was acquired by a Kaplan size to Washington Post in 2009 and I was trying to think of the problems that I'd seen over the years and I might want to try and address personally and the problem I kept coming back to was that those analysts reminded me so much of myself when I was at the law firm where they done well in school they got the jobs they thought they were supposed to get they were working hard but they didn't really know what they were doing why they were there they weren't very engaged with their work and so they were going to try and figure it out and leave to do something else but they would take the GMAT as like a safety safety hatch or escape hatch if it didn't work out so the the path would go to yours analyst program try and do something else find it it's not a perfect fit go to business school for two years load up with 100k in debt have your choices constrained a little bit and then go to do something else that that hopefully would be a better fit and that's typically not the the last step because the post MBA position the typical tenure actually what do you guys think the typical tenure is of a post MBA position like in measured in years or months two years that's right so so they do that for two years and you know and then they they try and figure out the next thing so I saw that movie dozens or hundreds of times I saw my own movie and my and those of my law school classmates and I was like wow what a weird five year ringer we're putting so many of our young smart people through like that it's kind of unfair and at the same time I saw that Teach for America had channeled so many young smart people into education and saw that that that transformed their lives in many cases and so I thought wouldn't it be great if there was a Teach for America for startups and what do you call that you call that venture for America so I quit my job in 2011 to start this nonprofit I put in 120 km my own to start the organization and then went without salary for a year while I was going around recruiting people like Brian and I think Stevens actually saw me in that first college tour I was on Dukes campus and he said that he was only one in the room which is probably right because like you know not that many people showed up to that first college tour but now Duke is our number one feeder school where we had I want to say something like 70 applicants from Duke this past year we're gonna be one of the top 20 employers out of Duke alone this year so in 2011 I started the organization the budget that year was about two hundred thousand fast forward to today our budgets 3.3 million and we're growing quickly we had over a thousand applicants this year so what we do is we recruit top college graduates from around the country we bring them to a training camp where we say look here's a little bit about startups you become best friends with each other they all come to Providence Rhode Island and live in a brown dorm so it's very exciting those of you who are young like you know you can maybe imagine what that's like and then they work in startups for two years we bring them back together for a reunion have webinars for them and then they get operating experience so they work in the trenches of a start-up in one of these cities for two years at the end of the two years we have a seed fund waiting for them to invest in them if they decide to start a business and the angel investors in that seed fund include Jeff Weiner the CEO of LinkedIn and a number of other very prominent businessmen and executives so how do you guys would have considered a program like this when you were coming out of college a lot of you right so the point is that we want to try and create rational choices for our young people like right now we're saying hey here are your six menu items but in our heart of hearts we hope you don't do any of these six things we hope you do this weird off menu thing that we're gonna hide and make really difficult and and I'm here to say that's really silly that's like a very silly way to try and build a system or an economy where what we do is we should give them more diverse paths and diverse visions of success and make it just a principled rational choice where if someone's designed designed to try and build something that's what they should do if some was designed to be a contract reader they should do that instead but right now we're saying look no matter what you're designed to do here here the the paths in front of you choose one it's all bit like that movie divergent anyone see that movie divergent it's alright wasn't that good but it didn't remind me of this a little bit so our mission is to revitalize American cities and communities through entrepreneurship to enable our best and brightest to create new opportunities for themselves and others and to restore the culture of achievement to include value creation and risk reward and the common good and we can do these things then we believe we can revive the capacity of our top people to end up building the engines of innovation and prosperity for the future and it's all just about where our talents going I think you guys would agree that where our talent goes is going to end up determining the future 1 to 30 years from now when we can all tell the future as long as we know what our smart people are doing so I'm going to stop there for a second because I've been doing a lot of talking under any questions or thoughts not this yes so you put up a very intriguing list there about you know what the grads are seeking as they leave college prestige and so what's your message to counteract all that because that's that's a lot of it's a lot of weight there what's your name hello hello so Philip what's amazing is that Teach for America provides all of these things if you look at them with the possible exception of actually with the exception of money so Teach for America it's prestigious it's clearly marked progress opens doors gain skills community training etc venture of America checks every box on this list including potentially money if you stretch your time horizon a little bit because if you believe in yourself and think that you have what it takes to start a successful company then you'll defer some short-term rewards and then maybe have a shot at doing just that down the road so we agree with you that these are very compelling factors and we actually want to provide them and if we provide them then young people will walk this path yeah yeah so we have maybe we'll offer the Microsoft product if if all goes well here so there we have two full-time programming team members one of whom is an MBA from MIT and his job is to just offer professional development help the fellows get stronger at what they want to do we also have local resources in place for the fellows where they'll meet with business leaders in their communities so it's there they get a sense of the leadership in each city but we have programming webinars online licenses for various educational resources and then we bring them back together for training camp after their first year yeah how do you choose your target SIG's are there just the three cities that you mentioned or c5 a map for you what's uni deep sea all right so oh Gordon actually I'll come to the map in a second what I'm gonna do right now is just show you guys some young idealistic smart people which may or may not include Brian it's just sort of arbitrary now this is just to give you guys a sense as to who's in the program I think see when I even had some friends I don't know if any your friends are listed here you know Jacob Robinson yeah do you like it yeah Jacob's a winner so here are some of the people that made it through our selection process we have a three-stage selection process this year we had over a thousand applicants and about a hundred spots so it's about a ten percent acceptance rate we had a computer science major from Princeton who turned down spacex to joint venture for America we're getting very very smart young people it's you know so this did your question before I fell then here are some of the people that are out there right now working at startups around the country so I don't know what you think of when you see these faces like what are the commonalities I just think smart idealistic full of energy and passion right yes you can get that from these guys plus a little bit of diversity thrown in because we chose the faces and then here's some of the fellows that are coming out of the program so the first class is graduating this year and these guys are actually starting honest-to-god businesses and I can't tell you how excited I am about that because you know we don't expect everyone in this program to start a business that would be really very high bar but I'm going to give some shoutouts so Brian Rudolph graduates from Emory moves to Detroit to work at an e-commerce company and he started a pasta company called bonza pasta that's high-protein gluten-free pasta made of chickpeas who finds that peeling or appetizing so go to bonza pasta and just sign up for you know their mmm I do not but but you can have a box same time I do and just go into their website set up port turn pro bread bread Baltimore and Brian brochet co-founded a company to help small businesses tell their stories through video editing that's distributed and one of the ways they get the content is they give the businesses GoPro cameras and say I put these on your employees for a couple of days and then they'll edit the footage into a video for their website castle which is Tim Dingman and a few other guys who aren't pictured so castle is a software platform for local landlords what they sow these guys in Detroit they bought a foreclosed mansion for $9,000 and then they went around rehabbing it and while they were doing that they figured out that there's a disconnect between local landlords that have fewer than 10 properties and tenants that they just don't like or trust each other like if you ask either party said what's the problem they say like you know those other like those tenants aren't trustworthy and then the the tenants will say those landlords aren't trustworthy so they're building a communications platform between local landlords and tenants that's then going to build in reputational scores so that if you're a local landlord that does good stuff then you end up with like a castle reputation and then maybe you can even charge like you know four or five percent more rent over time but in the meantime it's a communications utility so so these are the startups that our fellows are just starting themselves having been in these cities for a little bit less than two years an additional about 50% of the fellows are staying in their cities and working at either the startup they've been out for last two years or another startup so it's actually working on the ground in the most important of ways so one of the things I realized very early on was that in order for young people to find this an appealing path it had to be someone that was cooler than me so I managed to enlist Tony Hsieh the CEO of Zappos Jeff Weiner the CEO of LinkedIn Dan Gilbert the founder of Quicken Loans so Dan's a story unto himself how do you guys know Dan Gilbert is or have a sense of what he's doing so Dan Gilbert's invested a billion dollars of his personal wealth into downtown Detroit and is now venture firm America's biggest supporter in bringing talented young people to work at his startups in Detroit so he's speaking at our Summer Celebration in June in New York I guess you guys might not be in New York next month but if you know anyone please send him our way it's gonna be a really good party Dan Porter is the former president of Teach for America from the 90s he was the head of a company called oMG pop that may draw something that was acquired by Zynga I want to say two years ago Alisa Volkman was the co-founder Balcom was acquired by Disney so we have some real winning people associated with venture for America in part because we knew that young people wanted to learn from experienced entrepreneurs and so the team is very strong Mike Tarullo is a Duke grad and the same fraternity as Steven so it's one reason why we're so strong at Duke we're gonna get those brand numbers up so the team is the team and so here's the city question who has the city question was neon sorry Dean so we started out in Providence Detroit New Orleans Cincinnati in Las Vegas we expanded to Baltimore Cleveland in Philadelphia and this year we're expanding to San Antonio st. Louis Columbus and Miami and Miami has an unemployment rate of like 10.2 percent just you guys know so it's it's a you know people think Miami it's like more prosperous than it is probably at least statistically so these are 12 cities were in and I'm sure you guys have other thoughts as to where we could or should be we're just going to keep expanding each new city needs to have a few things going for it one it needs to have a robust set of startups for our fellows to work at because another premise of ours is that most of these fellows need to have establish businesses to work with like having them start businesses from day one would be a little bit over-ambitious to leadership in that city needs to be supportive and then three there needs to be a financial supporter for venture for America because our costs for doing what we do are about 35,000 per fellow over a two year period which is about twelve percent less than what Teach for America is spending right now on a per teacher basis and they're at scale they've been doing this twenty four years and we've only been doing it for a few years so I think we're relatively resource efficient but we can probably even get it a little bit tighter over time so to go to a new city like San Antonio we received a grant of five hundred thousand from Graham Weston who is the founder of Rackspace and now the CEO again and so when we go to a new city we're looking for a partner like that to be able to provide a runway so we can operate there for years because we know to your point in the back it's going to take many years for us to be able to have a real impact that you send in a initial group of twelve or fifteen or twenty young people that's going to be great but really we need to have the maturation period so that those
oung people end up becoming managers leaders founders and contributors in a meaningful way so this hundred seven fellows is from this past year and we have another 104 fellows coming in for training camp this year and they're going to be on their cities by August of this year so this number will go up to about 210 or so yeah how's your company so we have three people who go and kick the tires on a start-up that's in ours and that like if you were to be in one of our cities which city you want to be in Seattle interesting hypothetical there so so Seattle right now is not one of our cities but let's say it was and you just contact us and say hey I'm Henry right I'm Henry with a really interesting startup think I could use some young smart people and then we would send someone to meet with you and say what is a company who are you what are your needs and then decide if it's a fit if they decided was a fit which in your case probably would be honestly because you seem cool and you're clearly very smart to have the job you have so we then put you in the mick where right now for the hundred fellows in this year's program there are about 180 positions so it's competitive on the part of the companies and we have a surplus of opportunities relative to the fellows so you'd have to go and compete and try and get a young smart person that wanted to work with you and that would be the process it's pretty straightforward for the companies we do turn down a lot of companies because they're not growth oriented or now for the management team doesn't seem strong enough or the role isn't appropriate but I'm sure none of those things that apply [Music] sure right now we're in these twelve cities and I dare say that San Francisco is going to be maybe the last city we ever like actually go to or open up but we have people graduating each year and those people are often going to gravitate to San Francisco or New York or Seattle or these other markets we actually already have three or four fellows in San Francisco because their company got acquired and moved to San Francisco because they got into Y Combinator and so they opened the San Francisco office so things like that happen and we're not very dogmatic it's not like this thing where if you like leave you know your city all of a sudden like you know like we're upset at you if the needs of the company make it appropriate for you to wind up in any of these cities obviously that's cool and the other thing is two years is not forever so let's say we have 100 fellows this year and then 50 of them end up starting companies are staying in their cities that's still on another 50 young people who are probably going to want to work at startups in San Francisco Seattle New York etc so you can have them season for a couple of years in their city and startup and then try and hire them on the way out because that's their that's where actually can get connected more easily but they are not necessarily connected to talent that could help them so sometimes they can find founders or whatever there's two intrapreneurs moving in there but they're not from there they're just going there because they don't have any other options yeah and it's something that we'd like to combat over time is this notion that you must move to like particular geography San Francisco in particular if you want to start a business of a certain type I mean in order for the economy to grow the way we all want it to people need to be able to start businesses in cities around the country and if we can open up the talent pipeline for people who are starting companies in all of these cities and the ones that will follow I mean it'll make a big difference because in our experience companies need the following three things they need capital they need team and talent and then they need product market fit and people talk a lot about the first one which is just like investment capital but the entrepreneurs we talked to say team in town is actually the key driver and that most of them have trouble accessing that early on yeah so building on that and thinking about the 30 year growth scale what happens how are you guys setting the system up that would support the growth that growth the growth of the muscles graduated appropriate they've started a company assuming in that city do you support their growth that companies the new companies grows because it's I mean they're drawing from a local talent pool right so yeah not necessarily just you don't have a pipeline of new grads coming in to feed the new startup especially if they're grow and growing they're gonna hire 25 1,500 people whatever so what and that's gonna really investor that's really where it starts to affect the local economy in a much more significant way so what what's what do you have in place for supporting that so I'm super excited for that phase and we're just hitting that phase which is fellow star companies and so our goal is to help create a hundred thousand new US jobs and a lot of that's gonna be seeing these companies succeed so I'm very happy to say that the people who have been supporting venture of America to date like Jeff and Tony and Dan and UBS and and Barclays not as people are all hovering there waiting for our guys and gals to start companies they can come in and say yes let's make this stuff happen and I'm sure how many you guys in the room like you yourselves personally would like to help these these companies succeed like you know these 24 year old start companies like you guys all would right so so I'm happy to say that everyone's all waiting for it to happen and the fellows are up for the challenge where they're doing it but you're right that that challenge is going to mushroom quickly over time or if you look at the math let's say 20% of our fellow start businesses that means by two years from now we'll have something like 35 to 40 businesses that we need to help support and not all those businesses are gonna make it clearly when we all know the statistics on this but we have to hit make it so that enough of them succeed and hire and thrive and hire more people that we can start to have a real impact like a pet peeve of mine is institutions or programs that sort of have you for a particular period of time then when it's over they shake your hand and say like best of luck you know and I hate to say it but that resembles mostly institutions I know that I deal with people like for us venture for America is much more than like this two-year program we want to help you achieve your goals for a long time to come and I'm happy to say our supporters feel the same way it's a big challenge though no doubt about it I mean you know we're looking at dozens eventually hundreds of businesses ya know so so this year as an example we have four teams you know six fellows four teams and we have 150 k to distribute among them provided by UBS Americas so they're all gonna get something and then they have this angel council of between 500 thousand a million to pitch to and that's gonna be up to the Angels how much they want to invest so you're guaranteed very little I mean our program is the real world just like in the real world you're guaranteed very little you know you have to fight for it for us too but it's in our interest to help them to accept we can first I'm happy to say that we had applicants for from 142 schools this past year and we have fellows from schools that no one's ever physically visited because of resource constraints so we have fellows from University of Oklahoma Auburn there's one guy who was a marine and served in Afghanistan and then graduate from UC Santa Barbara and is now working in Detroit so we know that talents everywhere I mean certainly if you have a limited amount of resources you might start at certain schools but we know that people are capable of great things from all sorts of backgrounds to the high school college question we've drawn a line that we're taking college graduates that's somewhat arbitrary but it's just something that we decided to to implement but there going to be people in our opinion and you can see from the nature of this presentation people are questioning college but in our opinion most people probably are going to graduate from most people have a certain background are probably going to graduate from college and they probably should graduate from college in our mind and that if there's a place we can intervene it's actually in their options after college graduation so let's see that's the approach we're taking you know I know Peter Thiel and and and others are like trying to go earlier but we think the crucial juncture is this point after graduation yeah now that you're back on the on the map I'll go back to the geography topic is there anything you do in your marketing or your programming to get people over any reluctance to go to somebody's locations I hear you that two years isn't isn't forever but I know when I was fresh out of school going to a great place was very high on my criteria how do you overcome that what's your name Camp Jim so part of it is the self selection process that if you apply to venture for America you're not sure where you're gonna wind up do you graphically so you need to have a degree of flexibility to throw your hat in the ring so by the time they get to us you know they're they're not fixed on one location and when they get into the process they quickly have have a sense of the fact that they're going to be working at a real company and get very focused on the specific roles and companies that they're gonna be working for and they become less less fixated on what city it's in so if they say it's like hey just give me a great company I don't care if it's Baltimore Philadelphia Columbus Las Vegas they just want to find a great company with a team that they mesh with and that's again the self selection based upon the people that came to us the other thing is that if you were to move to a city and know that you're going to go with like five to ten of your new friends then it makes most any environment much more hospitable a number of the fellows are living with people from the program or are living in the same building or block and so if you put it that hat on where you're like hey I can go just about anywhere if I've got six new friends and a bit of a network then it makes them I think a little bit more versatile that way it's a good time it's like you know it's like two years in a major American city or less major American city but but - is it a in an American city with like five new friends I mean you know it's like an adventure yeah so your recruitment season is like the fall of Central Beau's senior year yes okay so a lot of like the places you described where smart people go like the goldman sachs of the Mackenzies of the world they get their students or their future employees locked in in that post junior summer so how do you kind of combat that so we actually are going to start a selection day for juniors where if they come in they get an offer spring of their junior year for the the summer after graduation and that's how we're going to sort of make it even but it's a great question the process that we described here does begin very early where many juniors are getting offers at the end of their summer before their senior year and then they take it so they can be set so we're gonna do the same thing okay sorry yeah what about offering internships at these same companies to juniors yeah we're gonna start looking at that as well we want to go both upstream and downstream so upstream would be summer internships downstream would be phd's unhappy lawyers or bankers or consultants of which there's no shortage that don't want to head on it and do something else my brother is an academic and so how do you guys are academically a number of you or at least not academics but like got a PhD of some kind I feel like wow so for some ways I thought there's a room for easties so it does say Microsoft Research in the door right so um so my brother's an academic and I have a sense that there's a little bit of inefficiency going on there and so we'd like to be able to offer options both up and down over time yeah what does venture for America ask in return it's a great question so for a start-up to be considered like Henry for example if Henry were to say hey I'd like to hire a fellow we say one you have to commit to paying them a base salary of 38 K to start subject to increases if they work out so that's very reasonable but you have to have at least two years of runway for that because it's obviously like a genuine early hire an employee so that's like the easiest thing the next is that they need to have a specific role that's not fungible so you can't have like five people doing the same job in one of them's a fellow you have to commit to sitting down with them once a month as the founder or very very senior executive so that they get a sense of exposure to the business and then you also have to occasionally like let them go to things like training cambrian which is you know it's within the confines of vacation but you should know that there's some programming that takes place that the fellow is probably gonna want to go to that you should let them do you know within reason and also you should invest in their development such that you can try and hire them after the program ends because we're not that interested in companies that are like hey this is a two-year thing and that's that we're looking for companies that want to try and fit that person into their team long term and so if a company falls short of those things and the fellow is unhappy then we can re-examine the fit which happened a little bit more in the first year or so and then the second year a little bit less so and I think is continuing to improve as our relationships with companies get better and there's a firmer understanding so yeah and you know are there are you matching to like how are you actually are they just doing that straight management and they shoot so let me go back some profiles you can see some different majors here and here I'll use this cuz here's your religion major so Jill Morrison here started a backpack company in college too so he's very enterprising but we believe that talent is versatile and can do lots of different things and that if you're really good at one thing you can probably learn to be good at something else so that our fellows have what we call adaptive excellence which is just they demonstrate they're really good at something and we can project that they can learn other things so I'd say 25 percent of the fellows or other engineers or hard science graduates where they studied like biochemistry or chemical engineering or something like that and then we have a host of social science people like economics finance etc and then a handful of humanities people I'd say about 25 percent are like Johanna or Joe so one of the misconceptions we think is out there is that you need to be a computer science major to go into startups but startups need as you guys know very accomplished content creators marketers branding people business development sales etc and so what we do is we source for all of those roles in these companies how many you know it's a little bit like what the consulting firms do because like no one majored in consulting you know what I mean you did major in consulting people would probably be a little worried about you okay so so the consulting firms trust that if you are really smart and hardworking and accomplished that you can learn consulting and so we're we're a little bit the same way yeah in the back schools like the University of Washington which probably isn't school but do you send out information to all of the different career counseling offices at universities or I don't have a set aside to find you so we have a full-time recruitment team of three people we have been in in most major publications at this point but we also know that college seniors aren't sitting there reading the New York Times Wall Street Journal like looking for stuff like us so we do try and hit the ground at these campuses but we'd love your help on this I mean I think that our brand right now is still building up our awareness is still building up but
if you know young smart people you know among your nieces nephews friends neighbors etc that you think this resembles please have them apply I mean you know the more talent we get in the more of an impact we can have so we're just getting started on that front but we love we love University of Washington since we love people from all over yeah they could have been in the workplace we say zero to three years so it's senior college up to a few years out we had one guy Brent Baltimore who was an investment banking analyst at Credit Suisse for two years and then he was also on the National Champion rugby team but I was in college and then he was a credit Swiss banking analyst and then left to join us after his analyst program was over so we had two years pull so if you have people that resemble that you can send them our way too so what'd you guys think any like thoughts or reactions to this is it awesome yeah yeah all right I'm glad you like it so like that the plan here is to fix the country really I know and if we get enough smart people building cool companies throughout the country we think that this could be a game-changer especially because we could change the nature of people's choices is right now there's zero weight or morality to going to be a corporate lawyer no one says hey that's like good or bad that's just what achievement looks like today but if you have different flavors of achievement where you can say to a younger version of me hey guess what maybe that's not what you should be doing maybe I should be doing this other thing instead that it can have impact I mean that's about the restore restoration of the culture piece because you know we need our best people trying to solve problems we can't have people trying to maneuver themselves close enough to the geyser where you know some of it like rains down on them I mean that that's a bad place to be as a country yeah what is five years from now look like are you still around are you doing five years I still around we got a question is that oh my god you know is this a what's what's the long-term look like for this it's you know cuz it's 30 years is a long horizon it's a long time yeah I agree I was joking with Amy on the way in here it's like in 30 years they'll like roll me out like you know for special occasions and I like points I'm like wise in hand at someone like scare some young person here um it's been an incredible three years I mean like knowing where we were three years ago I mean we were like me and a PowerPoint deck and and me and Steven and enduring I'm like looking at each other um you know and now I'm looking at all of you Plus whoever is looking online so it it's been an incredible run because everyone wants to solve this problem you know so if in five years the problem solved that would be dynamite I have an instinct that the problem will not be entirely solved in five years and that the organization will still be doing work and by five years from now these guys would be five years out in the field like having run companies for five years I mean oh my god like imagine what that does like let's say their company gets to 20 people and then they're hiring people from the program and then like you know they look up to these role models I mean the fact that we've done what we've done when these guys are the tip of the spear like it is encouraging in part because it just gets much more like self-reinforcing over time it's like if you can go to Duke and say hey guess what here's a Duke grad from you know four years ago who's now CEO of a company in you know Baltimore you're like wait that's possible I can do that it's like yeah you don't have to go to McKinsey you know and and try and like scheme your way out you you can do this and then maybe you can be this guy I mean the fact that we've done what we've done without even to having that guy 2.2 or gal yeah nuts really like the first fellows deserve a lot of credit in part because you know they're taking a real leap but as we build a track record is just gonna get better their thoughts so where was I in this ah yes so uh I wrote a book called smarter people should build things they're available back then it's here so the books about the ideas behind venture for America and some of the things I went into founding it so if you have an interest in seeing how the organization came to be where it is today you know the book has that there's some nice quotes about the book - here's read the book alright Michael and Amy so if you know if you want their honest review after I'm done talking so idle up to them and ask them what they think one of the things that book does have is it has a breakdown of the six paths and what it is that are smart people are doing and it has like primary research and all that stuff so those who are into that stuff you know it's like a little bit of a social science entrepreneurship tome so my contact information is andrew adventure from america.org we're excited to work with microsoft and all of you so the three pillars of what we do you can help with all of them one is recruiting very smart young people to is enlisting cool start-up companies around the country and three is our own organizational resources so we have young people I'll give you guys a story and hopefully we'll make you mad and then you guys will like you know want to do thing about that so my guy Tim Dingman he's an electrical engineer out of brown and he wanted an engineer mentor how many guys are engineers and I review excellent so you want an engineer mentor and and then I was like we need to get you an engineer mentor and so we found a guy at Google Scott Johnston who's like I'll be his mentor so we have a host of young people who all want like experienced professional mentors and resources and that could be many of you here in this room where if you want to take an enterprising 22 23 year old who's trying to rebuild a country under your wing please get in touch with us we'd love that and so there are many things that hopefully we can all do together I know you you know to a book talk and you're left with you know now this new set of responsibilities but this organization is very much a work in progress I mean it's a living thing you know it changes every every day and every week and so if you think that what we're doing is something that you'd like to help with please just get in touch with me and I'd love to hear from you so I know we've already entered the Q&A period but I guess we can officially do so now yes it pains me greatly on multiple levels we have one international right now but that's sort of an exception because most of the startups don't have the resources to address the visa documentation issue but it's something that we'd love to help change over time so we got one but we'd like to have many many more yes we haven't encountered that particular situation yet and we want the person to live and work here in one of these cities to the extent possible because that's going to be a big part of the social experience another thing so I we probably wouldn't want to have that situation Caleb right Caleb do the fellows have any say in to what city they're placement like a preference or do you place them based on their skills in it they can't express preferences and we try to meet them because it's just good for everyone if someone goes where they want to go but in order to get into the program they have to know that there's some flexibility involved because we may not be able to find you know that company for them in that city I joke sometimes that's like we can't invent companies you know it means like companies that are in these cities are what they are you know it is a fit great I'd say we satisfy preferences a majority of the time and often when they get into the interview process they realized that their preferences might not be as fixed they thought iris gentlemen up fantastic out what your long-term goal was turn here plan this is just more of some feedback as you grow you might want to consider a venture for America veterans and doing the same model for our people coming out of the military or later for America mid-level people not necessarily right out of university but in the mid group that have been working but also watched a nervous yeah I'd love all of those things I just want to erase inefficiencies and I I there are tremendous inefficiencies around the populations you just described we'd love to do that veterans mid-level more experienced etc yeah do you tell them expanding internationally in the long run or are you it's cool to deal with so so some people have started venture for Canada and venture for India with our blessing I joke that we don't really want to start venture for Earth it just seems a little too grandiose and there's enough to do here well one of my so my personal motivation obviously I like entrepreneurship and the rest of it but I'm American my kids are gonna grow up in this country I want to help this country you know if other people want to help their countries that's fantastic but that's not really why I started venture for America you know I feel very indebted to this country because I'm a you know I mean second generation like relatively recent arrival and yeah I just saw there was a problem and I thought I might have a shot at contributing to its solution so that's just my personal motivation you know who are like 30 years from now I'm sure someone will succeed me and say Andrew yang so short-sighted thank you for venture for Earth and then there'd be this giant globe it'd be like our founder didn't have the vision that I have bring it together without you well we try and help better for Canada metric rainy I mean I'm very like supportive it's just it part of its that I think organizations do need to you know walk before they can run and focus on what they need to do and the u.s. there's so much work to do here I'm also much more familiar with the setting here in the backdrop though people in Europe have told me like in England this is super pronounced than that just replaced New York in San Francisco with London and replace financing insulting with finance and consulting so they're so they're like issues around the country I think there are some universal truths here about just the fact that resources influence the flow of talent and that if those market forces aren't somehow counterbalance and they lead to a very kind of extreme perverse outcomes over time I think that that's true everywhere thank you for watching we hope you enjoyed and before we go I want to give a huge thank you to all of our God Tyr patrons over on patreon
