Postscript Appended
Jessica Bruder Kathy Cheng: “Detroit was the last place I thought I’d end up.”
Start
The adventure of new ventures.
For more than a year now, Andrew Yang has been traveling the nation evangelizing Venture for America. From gritty inner cities to college campuses and the White House, the former corporate lawyer has made dozens of stops pitching the nonprofit organization, which he hopes will become a Teach for America for young entrepreneurs.
Ten months after we covered his early efforts to send fresh talent to start-ups in struggling cities, the first 40 Venture for America fellows have made it through a five-week boot camp. They’ve fanned out across New Orleans, Las Vegas, Detroit, Providence and Cincinnati. They’re now starting two-year jobs at an eclectic array of start-ups, ranging from Are You a Human, which designs game-based verification systems to thwart spam bots, to Kickboard, an online dashboard that helps teachers track student performance and behavior.
“At school, you learn how to learn, but not how to do. I want to learn how to build things and make them successful,” said Kathy Cheng, 22, who graduated in June from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and took a Venture for America fellowship at Doodle Home, a Detroit-based company whose Web site helps interior designers manage projects, request product samples and quotes, and build profiles to woo potential clients. The 15-employee firm was started two years ago by Jennifer Gilbert – her husband, Dan Gilbert, is the founder of Quicken Loans – and it operates from a slick downtown tech hub called the M@dison that Mr. Gilbert unveiled in 2011 as part of a broader effort to re-energize the Motor City.
“If you’d asked me last year, Detroit was the last place I thought I’d end up,” Ms. Cheng said. Joining a start-up wasn’t a part of her plan either. That changed last year. While interning for the Small Business Administration, she heard Mr. Yang give a talk; he suggested she apply for a fellowship. And Ms. Cheng began thinking about the potential of entrepreneurship to revitalize cities.
“Back then, I thought I wanted to do management consulting,” she said. “But you know how sometimes things just click into place? It was like that.” As a business analyst for Doodle Home, she plans to study how designers interact with the company’s online platform. She sees her fellowship as a way “to empower creative people to do their best work.”
(Some of her peers just sounded relieved to avoid Wall Street; as one Wharton grad wrote on Venture for America’s blog: “I had been looking through endless job postings for I-banking and other finance-related positions on my school’s career Web site, trying not to vomit, when I came across Venture for America.”)
Meanwhile, Mr. Yang is gearing up to recruit a fresh batch of 100 fellows and exploring a handful of cities – Baltimore, Cleveland, New Haven, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Raleigh-Durham – for possible expansion in 2013. His long-term objective is even more ambitious: creating 100,000 jobs by 2025.
“Our goal is to give rise to a virtuous cycle,” Mr. Yang said. “Let’s say someone like Kathy, when her time at Doodle Home is at an end, she decides she likes the area, she’s friends with people there, she has a network. So she decides to start her own thing. If she wants to hire some young, smart, inexpensive venture fellows, we’re essentially creating a massive pool of people for her to choose from. You can imagine it in five to 10 years from now. The current fellows will be the leaders of a new generation of companies.”
If you had a mission to restore the economy and a team of fresh college graduates at your disposal, where would you send them?
You can follow Jessica Bruder on Twitter.
Postscript: September 11, 2012
A previous version of this post reported that the M@dison building opened in January; it opened in January 2011.
Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/its-first-graduates-on-the-job-venture-for-america-looks-for-fresh-recruits/?partner=rss&emc=rss