Lego City

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has,” asserted anthropologist Margaret Mead.  An army of builders is being recruited and trained by Venture for America (“VFA”), the nonprofit founded by Andrew Yang.  On its website VFA announces that “It is a program for young, talented grads to spend two years in the trenches of a start-up with the goal that these graduates will become socialized and mobilized as entrepreneurs moving forward.”

The VFA, which was inspired by Teach for America, aims to place graduates of top universities in start-ups or early-stage companies in lower-cost cities such as, Providence, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Detroit, and New Orleans.  The goal is to introduce these graduates to business operations through on-the-job training and mentorship.  VFA pays the Fellows a stipend; puts them through a 5 week entrepreneurship boot camp before the Fellows are placed in a sponsoring company for two years.  Fellows who want to start a business after the two year stint are eligible to apply to VFA for seed capital of $100,000.

VFA’s mission is:

To revitalize American cities and communities through entrepreneurship.  To enable our best and brightest to create new opportunities for themselves and others.  To restore the culture of achievement to include value creation, risk and reward, and the common good.

Yang’s book Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America (2014) sets forth his vision for creating jobs and revitalizing America through entrepreneurship. Yang’s analysis of the state of job creation in the United States and the development of graduates of top universities as entrepreneurs, contextualizes my research among Millennials who are acquiring knowledge and experience about innovation and entrepreneurship.  Yale, like VFA, is providing young people a supportive environment where they are able to gain experiential training and mentoring.  These students are being empowered to build things (for-profit and nonprofit businesses) with a sense of purpose.  VFA’s program provides an alternative to the default path (finance, consulting, law, medicine, Teach for America, Grad School) pursued by the majority of graduates of top universities.  VFA attempts to make this alternative path, a valued path that is a rational, principled choice.  The aim is to foster an instinct toward building so that whether you are a founder or an employee it is hard to let go of the notion of creating value and having an impact.

In Smart People Should Build Things, Yang makes the point that if you are the sort of person who could start a successful business, you could pretty easily get a job.  Through this blog, I have been trying to make the point that we need our most eminently employable people to start and run companies.  People who have skills, exposure, credibility, resources, talents, character, persistence, know-how, networks, cultural capital, and intellectual capital should build things.  I believe that exposing undergrads to entrepreneurship will make them more likely to perceive the entrepreneurship path as a rational choice.  An example of this is a mechanical engineering Senior who was a member of the inaugural class of the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design Summer Fellows program.  His team designed and prototyped a bio-medical sensor during the Summer of 2013; they proved that the concept was viable.  Since then the team has obtained a provisional patent on the technology.  This mechanical engineering Senior has not been involved in the traditional job interview process because his team has applied to the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Summer Fellowship program (“YEI”).  If the team is accepted into this YEI program, they will spend the Summer of 2014 building a business around their patented technology.

At Yale, for instance, Start Something is a program sponsored by the YEI that provides students and faculty an opportunity to learn the basic tools that entrepreneurs use to launch new companies including the Lean Start-up method.  It is intended for people who have an idea and are not sure how to develop a business around the idea, as well as people who are wondering how to develop an idea that might morph into a business.

Former President Levin in his address to the Yale School of Management MBA Class of 2014 said, “What’s still missing in New Haven is more of a culture of innovative start-up companies with Yale graduates at the helm.”  What if Yale launched “Venture for New Haven,” a local version of VFA, that each year provided a fellowship to four Yale graduates and placed them in local start-ups or early-stage companies?  What measurable impacts would result from such an initiative?  Would these Fellows be more likely to stay in New Haven as employees or founders of their own companies?  Would this initiative create jobs in New Haven?