Venture for America Fellowship Program

VFA is a two-year Fellowship program that equips college graduates with skills and resources they need to become successful entrepreneurs. We prepare Fellows for an entrepreneurial path with the goal of fostering new venture formation and job growth in the US while increasing diversity in the startup sector.

Venture for America is a nonprofit fellowship program empowering recent college graduates to launch their careers as entrepreneurs while creating economic opportunity in American cities. After five weeks of training, VFA Fellows spend two years working for a startup in a U.S. city with an emerging startup ecosystem. Throughout the fellowship, they learn how to contribute to a high-growth business and gain access to mentorship, ongoing training, and the nationwide VFA community. When Fellows and alumni are ready to build companies of their own, VFA provides access to resources to help them become successful entrepreneurs.

Our goal is to create an onramp to entrepreneurship for young people, which will ultimately fuel job growth in cities throughout the U.S. Our program empowers our best and brightest - including disadvantaged youth who otherwise would not have access to an entrepreneurial career path - to create value in their communities.

VFA addresses several key entrepreneurial challenges with the work we do: attracting and retaining talent, spurring new venture formation, creating quality jobs, and improving diversity in the startup sector by making entrepreneurship accessible to all regardless of race, gender, and/or socioeconomic status. We recruit, select, and train top graduates from diverse backgrounds to equip them with skills required to succeed as an entrepreneur. They apprentice at startups in emerging entrepreneurial ecosystems, where they learn firsthand the challenges of building a business, and often start their own ventures. Our current cohort has a demographic makeup of 43% women; 15% Black, 11% Asian, 6% Latinx, and 5% self-identified Fellows; 33% with student debt and 17% that come from a household that makes <$50,000. In scaling our model, we aim to increase these numbers and therefore the diversity in our Fellow cohorts, ensuring we provide an onramp to entrepreneurship to all these groups.

Entrepreneurship in the US is at a multi-decade low: the percentage of business owners under 30 has fallen by 65% since the 1980s. Talented millennials are less likely to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors than they are to pursue “safe” careers paths (i.e. consulting).

Beyond this overall decline in entrepreneurship, the rate at which women, URMs, and youth from lower socioeconomic backgrounds start companies is also falling. The barrier to entry for entrepreneurship for these groups is high. I.e., in 2015, women represented only 36.8% of entrepreneurs, and Black male founders received only 2% of all venture capital invested.

Entrepreneurship is the fulcrum to a strong economy. New venture creation and job growth are the most productive ways to have an economically vibrant community, and placing Fellows in startups in emerging cities helps create these jobs. In order to do this, we must provide opportunities and lower the barrier to entry for aspiring entrepreneurs, particularly those from diverse backgrounds. We provide a pathway to entrepreneurship to our Fellows, forging opportunities and enabling them to create opportunities for themselves and their communities.

VFA aims to achieve these outcomes in all of our cities:

• 30% of Fellows will launch a side project in the community
• 42% of all Fellows and Alumni will participate in some form of Launch programming
• Company Partners will add an average of 5 new jobs within two years of hiring a Fellow
• 60% of Fellows will remain in their cities post-Fellowship
• 20% of Fellows will launch their own company within 3 years of graduating 

We also aimed to achieve the following demographic outcomes for our Class of 2017:

• 50% women
• 12% Black, 12% Latinx, 15.5% Asian, 7% two or more races
• 43% with student debt

Track alumni retention data by sending out quarterly surveys and following up over the phone and via email - Fellow retention in VFA cities and participation in Launch programming

Continuously follow up with company partners and alumni who have founded companies to track job growth data, via quarterly surveys and check-ins - Number of jobs created by company partners and Fellow founded companies

Track the demographic breakdown of the final Class of 2017 - Gender, race, and socioeconomic diversity in 2017 Fellow Cohort

No other national organization has a program that recruits top graduates, funnels them into growth companies, and combines technology and a human approach to create a clear path to entrepreneurship for college graduates, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Our activities are changing entrepreneurship. We offer a robust curriculum over two years while Fellows work at startups across the country, and provide resources and capital to them when they are ready to found their own companies. While our approach is human-centered, some of our training materials are online (i.e. our proprietary learning management system).

Two examples of our custom platforms include our mentorship platform, VFA Connect, which connects Fellows to mentors across the country; and our learning management system, Venture Academy, which hosts online courses and resources that equip Fellows with the understanding they need to launch their own ventures.

Apart from this online aspect, our program is extremely human centered: For example, Fellows spend 5 weeks at our annual Training Camp at the beginning of their Fellowship, where they learn from expert trainers from organizations like McKinsey and IDEO, and they receive consistent mentorship guidance from the VFA team for their entire Fellowship.

Our program and resources are already deployed and available to all of our Fellows. Our Fellowship program - and all the resources it encompasses, such as our trainings, programming, and online platforms - is entirely funded by our institutional and individual donors. As an organization that aims to make entrepreneurial opportunities accessible to all bright, talented youth, including those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, it is crucial that our programming and resources are available to everyone in our program. 

Sustainability is paramount for VFA as we continue to expand. We seek to have each VFA city entirely self-funded, primarily through regional institutional support. We also receive funding from national supporters, such as Bank of America, UBS Americas, and Barclays, which helps to defray overhead costs and support expansion and special events. Wherever possible, we seek to secure multi-year commitments to ensure sustainability. We are also currently building out a structured individual giving program to ensure long term financial sustainability.

In addition, we established the VFA Seed Fund to support companies founded by VFA Fellows & Alumni. Entrepreneurs including Jeff Weiner, Graham Weston, and Dara Khosrowshahi of Expedia have committed a total of $1mm to the Fund. The seed fund will allow VFA to continue to attract high-potential Fellows to our program and enable us to provide key financial support for promising companies, increasing their chances of success.

As VFA places its sixth class of Fellows and we scale nationally, we are continually challenged to maintain a personal touch and regional focus. With nearly 700 Fellows and Alumni spanning 18 cities, it is increasingly difficult for the VFA team to develop personal relationships with all Fellows. As a result of these new challenges that come with scale, VFA has begun placing regional Community Directors within key markets, and aims to have a Community Director in every VFA within 3 years. This personal connection to our cities will allow us to have more of an impact on each Fellow.

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VFA was founded in 2011; our program has grown from an inaugural cohort of five Fellows placed in 5 cities to 182 Fellows spanning 18 US cities. Our annual budget has grown from less than $400,000 to over $6.4million in 2017. We have consistently been one of the fastest growing American nonprofits. Our efforts over the next several years will be primarily directed toward strengthening our program and ensuring we continue to create opportunities for entrepreneurial youth. In becoming part of the MIT Solve community, we aim to build our network of organizations that support our mission and vision.

In an effort to attract a more diverse applicant pool, our recruitment team partners with organizations including Jopwell, Prep for Prep, and Code 2040. We also partner with institutional and individual donors to offer annual Opportunity Awards, student loan forgiveness awards for Fellows with high student loan debt.

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