“There is an offer and a demand. We just need to connect the two sides, ”he wrote in a letter announcing the group that would resemble Teach for America, the nonprofit that recruits graduates to teach in low-income schools.
“Our stated goal is to create 100,000 US jobs by 2025,” he wrote.
The idea gained widespread attention in the news media, including The Times, and received donations – mostly from big banks like UBS and Barclays, as well as Dan Gilbert, head of Quicken Loans, and Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, the online Shoe retailer.
In 2012, Venture for America selected its first class, 31 men and nine women.
The group trained them in a month-long bootcamp at the alma mater, Brown University, and then helped them apply for two years as fellows at startups in Cincinnati, Detroit, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Providence, RI
The startups paid fellows up to $ 38,000 per year and donated $ 5,000 to nonprofits. Many companies took the opportunity to attract top talent at a bargain price. Venture for America encouraged the fellows to develop their own business ideas and offered to help them find funding.
Soon, Venture for America began recruiting much larger classes of fellows and expanding into more cities as Mr. Yang raised more money – and made bigger and bigger statements about the program’s success.
While running Venture for America, Yang eventually told donors that the organization had already created 5,000 jobs. When critics ran for president and questioned its claims to success, he said it created thousands of jobs.
