Mission Statement
The Problem
Enterprising college graduates crave hands-on business experience to learn how to develop a business and create value. At the same time, many promising early-stage businesses struggle to identify, recruit, and enlist talented college graduates, in large part because they lack the resources, brand equity and scale to engage in on-campus recruiting.
What We Do
Venture for America will recruit the best and brightest college grads to work for two years at emerging start-ups and early-stage companies in lower-cost cities (e.g., Detroit, Providence, New Orleans). Modeled after Teach for America, Venture for America will provide a path for entrepreneurship to college grads who want to learn how to build companies and create jobs.
The goal is that a substantial proportion of VFA Fellows will become successful entrepreneurs, preferably rooted in the communities to which they are assigned. Venture for America’s purpose is job generation – our immediate goal is to generate 100,000 new U.S. jobs by 2025 by helping growth companies expand and training a critical mass of our top graduates to themselves become business builders and job creators.
Strategy & Impact
- 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.
The Problem
Enterprising college graduates crave hands-on business experience to learn how to develop a business and create value. At the same time, many promising early-stage businesses struggle to identify, recruit, and enlist talented college graduates, in large part because they lack the resources, brand equity and scale to engage in on-campus recruiting.
What We Do
Venture for America will recruit the best and brightest college grads to work for two years at emerging start-ups and early-stage companies in lower-cost cities (e.g., Detroit, Providence, New Orleans). Modeled after Teach for America, Venture for America will provide a path for entrepreneurship to college grads who want to learn how to build companies and create jobs.
The goal is that a substantial proportion of VFA Fellows will become successful entrepreneurs, preferably rooted in the communities to which they are assigned. Venture for America’s purpose is job generation – our immediate goal is to generate 100,000 new U.S. jobs by 2025 by helping growth companies expand and training a critical mass of our top graduates to themselves become business builders and job creators.
Strategy & Impact
- Funnel a generation of our top young people toward American start-ups in areas of need
- Socialize talented college grads and train them to become action-oriented, enterprising and innovative
- Provide structure and a community to cohorts of future entrepreneurs
- Redirect talent to help renew our economy and our culture
- Firmly establish entrepreneurship as a professional aspiration for our best and brightest
- Create Venture Fellows, past and present, to become job creators and entrepreneurs in communities throughout the country
- Over time, present a new set of role models for students to emulate