Connections
EXONIAN PROFILE
A N D R E W YA N G ’ 9 2
Creating the Next Class of CEOs
A
ndrew Yang ’92 became a corporate attorney at a New York City law firm because, he admits, “that’s what I thought success looked like.” A year into a job that wasn’t personally gratifying,Yang became enticed by the idea of entrepreneurship. He quit the firm and founded the dot-com Stargiving, which folded less than two years after its launch. Yang, who started Stargiving in his 20s, says his first foray into business-building wasn’t easy, “but I have to say the experience was formative—you realize you can pick yourself up after failure.” During his next venture—CEO of the test-prep company Manhattan GMAT (later acquired by Kaplan/The Washington Post Co. in 2009)— Yang discovered that other ambitious college graduates favor corporate jobs more for the job security and less for their passion for the work. Entrepreneurship had once excited them in college, but they lacked the skills and outlets necessary to follow through with their aspirations.Yang had an idea. Now CEO of Venture for America, Yang has founded an organization with a win-win model: Recent college graduates, or fellows, are linked with startup companies located in cities hit hard by the economic recession. Each Venture for America fellow commits to working at a company for two years and receives a salary and on-the-ground training in entrepreneurship. The top-performing fellows from each two-year session may also earn $100,000 in seed money to start businesses of their own. “You provide growth companies and startups with the talent they need to expand and hire people . . . and you train your best and brightest grads so they themselves become business builders. It seems so obvious, doesn’t it?” Yang, 38, says with a chuckle. The model is apparently working. To date, Venture for America has raised more than $3 million to support its efforts and has formed partnerships with companies that include dot-com juggernauts Zappos and LinkedIn. More than 40 grads have already been placed in startups in Cincinnati, Detroit, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Providence with an additional 60-plus set for this year (the program is expanding into Baltimore and Cleveland this summer).Venture’s ultimate goal is to create 100,000 new U.S. jobs by 2025. When asked to counterargue the belief that assisting a handful of startups will do little to resurrect a city’s economy, Yang says, “This is a long-term solution to a very significant problem. Let’s say you bring in 10 to 20 young people to Detroit for two years. At the end of those two years, you have 40 to 60 new people in that city, and the first 20 are starting new companies and hiring new people through the program. You can imagine a long-term cycle where businesses start supporting each other.The goal is to give rise to this cycle.” The cycle can only work by placing determined go-getters. Yang looks for “adaptive excellence” in applicants— people who have shined in an academic, athletic or leadership capacity. He credits his own professional drive, in part, to the Exeter experience. “People graduate from Exeter with a duty to do what you can for the greater community,” he says. “I certainly feel that sense of obligation, and Exeter had a lot to do with it.” Exeter’s network has also helped Yang with key organizational endeavors: One of his classmates, Jay Bockhaus ’92, serves on Venture for America’s board of directors. Mustafa Siddiqui ’96 linked Yang with the Blackstone Charitable Foundation, which recently contributed a grant of $150,000. Yang may be living his entrepreneurial dream, but he remains humble about it. “I just wanted to solve this problem,” he says. “I sleep a lot better knowing I’ve done everything I could to bring this organization to light. I’m very fortunate that I have chosen a particular path for myself and I’ve gotten to pursue it.That’s one thing I really want for people—I want them to feel they have the liberty to pursue their professional aspirations.” —Fred Durso Jr. 40
The Exeter Bulletin
S PRING 2013