Nelson: Less than 10% of the 200 companies we’ve partnered with. We’re looking for companies willing to spend time mentoring young talent.Īdams: How many failures are there among the companies where you’ve placed people? We rely on word-of-mouth and we talk to local incubators and accelerators. Nelson: We’re kind of like venture capitalists. We also know that tech jobs have a downstream effect in terms of creating other jobs.Īdams: How do you find and screen the companies where you place your fellows? If you’re a startup in Cleveland, you don’t have the bandwidth to recruit from Yale. Louis and Detroit, cities that struggle to retain and attract talent. Our startups are in places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Nelson: Our mission is to revitalize cities and communities through entrepreneurship. They needed someone to do fundraising, which I told myself I wasn’t going to do after business school, but I knew they were on the precipice of doing big things.Īdams: Why should a non-profit help for-profit businesses hire people?
Nelson: I was at NYU Stern business school and I read about VFA in The New York Times.
In this interview, which has been edited and condensed, she explains how VFA tries to help rebuild cities and encourage entrepreneurship.Īdams: What brought you to Venture for America? Yang is stepping down March 28 to write a book, and Nelson is moving up from managing director to the top job. The organization was founded in 2011 by Andrew Yang, 42, a graduate of Brown and Columbia Law School who ran a test prep company acquired by Washington Post/Kaplan in 2009. Venture for America does not subsidize salaries, which start at $38,000. Before they start their jobs, fellows go to a five-week boot camp hosted on the Brown University campus where they take crash courses in business, sales, marketing and product development. cities like Detroit and Birmingham, ALA, that lack the allure of Silicon Valley or New York. It finds jobs for each class of 200 fellows in startups located in 18 U.S. Modeled on Teach for America, which recruits college graduates from top schools to work as teachers, Venture for America draws from the same population. Attracted by the emerging field of impact investing-investing in companies with social missions-she earned a business degree from NYU’s Stern School and in 2013, she took a job as a fundraiser at a two-year-old non-profit, Venture for America. Instead of seeking out a well-paying corporate job, she scraped by on meager salaries at two international relief organizations. The first in her family to go to college, Amy Nelson, 33, was six months pregnant when she graduated from college.
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