By centering on purpose, successors can find their way through the noise and scrutiny that comes with a founder becoming a household name. (Illustration by iStock/Mykyta Dolmatov)
I remember the day more than three years ago when my boss, Andrew Yang, told me he was planning to run for president. I fought back the urge to say, “Of what?” and merely gave him a quizzical look. I already knew he planned to leave Venture For America (VFA), the organization he founded and we built together to prepare college graduates for careers as entrepreneurs. I knew he was increasingly troubled by the effects of automation on the US workforce and that he intended to do something about it. But I wouldn’t have ever dreamed that his solution would be to mount an outsider bid for the highest office in the country.
Taking the reins as successor when an ambitious founder-predecessor’s star continues to rise adds complexity to the already challenging period of transition, and VFA has experienced both wins and missteps as a result of Andrew’s momentous decision. Over the course of 2017, the VFA board, team, and I brushed up on transition best practices and followed a clear playbook. This included hiring a chief operating officer, as I had been Andrew’s right hand, and we needed to deepen our leadership bench to shift some responsibilities away from me. It also included developing a new strategic plan, which allowed me to put my stamp on the organization and gave me permission to roll back programs that didn’t serve the new vision.
Many things are better than ever at VFA as a result of this tightly managed transition. Having a clear strategic vision improved program success rates and led to fundraising wins with aligned donors. Today, it appears we are fully on the other side of the existential threat many organizations face when the founder steps aside: the possibility that they will take their powerful connections and charismatic leadership style with them. But our playbook didn’t anticipate the unique complications of having our founder step into the national limelight—three of which I describe below—nor did any of us predict that Andrew Yang would become a household name in the way that he has.
Challenge #1: Cutting the Cord
There is significant debate about the merits of founders making a “clean break” from the organizations they start. But in our case, with a founder moving in a publicly visible direction away from the organization, complete separation was critical for a few reasons. First, nonprofits are prohibited from supporting candidates for public office. Second, organizations can become mired in challenges when a former leader takes public office and scandal ensues. Finally, there was a practical urgency to separating the organization from the platform espoused by the campaign, regardless of how my colleagues or I personally felt about it. As an organization, VFA has always been strongly apolitical, allowing it to attract supporters and fellows with a variety of political orientations. This ideological diversity is a strength we have fought hard to retain, and a clean break allowed us to do so.
Because of this, on the advice of counsel, Andrew stepped off our board, and we even went so far as to build communications firewalls between our office and his new one. This meant I was no longer in regular communication with my former boss and mentor, and had to rely on my own insights and networks to lead the organization into its next phase.
Challenge #2: What Recognition Brings
I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me, “This must be great for your fundraising!” Well, no. While a handful of folks have learned about VFA through Andrew’s campaign messaging and decided to become financial supporters of our work, that isn’t how most people or institutions come to make charitable contributions. Especially in light of our world’s 24-hour news cycle and the many things that compete for our attention, it takes unusual diligence for someone to move from, “Wait, who is this person running for president?” to “I would like to make a charitable gift to the organization he once founded.” Fundraising at our organization almost always stems from deep personal or organizational relationships, not mass appeals. And due to our separation, it would have been inappropriate for VFA to use Andrew’s donor rolls for solicitation. So, while the transition certainly didn’t harm us financially, there’s been no windfall to speak of (apart from people calling our office trying to get ahold of Andrew and our need to explain: He’s not here! No, I can’t pass on the message!)
There has been an unprecedented influx in the form of applications to the VFA fellowship program. The number of annual applications has more than doubled over the past three years, since Andrew’s departure. A number of these candidates cite Andrew specifically as their inspiration. For the most part, this is great. But it has stretched our organization operationally; we rely much more on alumni application reviewers than we did in the past. And despite a larger volume of applications, we’ve found less “stickiness” among applicants. We have to search deeper to find candidates who are strongly aligned with our mission, and work harder to cultivate and retain them in an increasingly tight labor market (although COVID-19 is definitely changing this).
Challenge #3: Losing Control of the Narrative
When your organization comes into the public eye as a result of external factors rather than an intentional public relations campaign, it’s easy to lose control over your own narrative. VFA has always been a little bit difficult to explain to people—our work focuses on less-established startup hubs like Detroit, New Orleans, and Baltimore. We work with local startup leaders, professors of entrepreneurship, and different types of philanthropists and civic leaders. We want our fellows to build businesses and create jobs, but we also think about their impact much more broadly than that. We care about the entire trajectory of their careers, not just the two years they are in our program. What Andrew chose to say on the stump about VFA was totally at his discretion and almost never went into detail. But because we weren’t always in the driver’s seat when it came to messaging, mischaracterizations of our work cropped up on Twitter, and worse, in the press.
In a free society, the press has a duty to shine a light on political leaders and aspirants. As Andrew gained visibility, scrutiny of his legacy—which hinged on founding VFA—intensified. We refused to talk about Andrew or his policies, but occasionally we had to respond to press inquiries about VFA’s work. One reporter told me off the record that he was impressed by how difficult it was to find people who would make negative or critical comments about VFA. And yet we also encountered criticism and innuendo we were wholly unprepared for, in particular regarding how VFA had intentionally changed how it talked about itself and its goals over the years. We were comfortable recrafting the organization’s identity and its goal as part of our new strategic plan, and communicating the impact of the work we were doing accordingly. However, an old tagline Andrew used to launch the organization in 2011—that VFA would help create 100,000 jobs by 2025—came back to haunt us.
That tagline came before we had tested any of our ideas or recruited a single fellow. Today—after nine years of experience—we still care a great deal about job creation, but we now focus much more on attracting top entrepreneurial talent to markets experiencing brain drain and helping launch new ventures in these places. We have successfully demonstrated these outcomes, and they will have direct and indirect effects on job creation and economic resilience for decades to come. But because our current, directly attributable job creation numbers aren’t set to meet this early goal, some news outlets have portrayed VFA as a failure. The New Yorker, for example, casually wrote that “Venture For America did not achieve its goals” and dismissed us out of hand. And while the New York Times at least made it clear we still exist, it wrote, “Venture for America, which continues to operate under different leadership, has fallen well short of its goal.”
We learned that in a sound-bite culture often intent on finding scandal, nuanced, long-term thinking doesn’t always rise to the top. For now, we haven’t publicly sought to counter this narrative for fear that pushing back might instead amplify a story that’s already fading. We prefer to do the work, day in and day out, and let the efforts of our fellows speak for themselves. Our supporters and community continue to stand with us, so the measurable impact has been minimal.
Building Confidence and Moving Forward
VFA is using this time of physical distancing to quietly refine our work and plan for growth. This includes investing in a diversity audit and brand update, and having conversations with leaders in cities across the United States to expand the program in 2021 and beyond. All of this will continue to reshape our work beyond the founding vision. The biggest investment we are making is in a comprehensive impact study of our work. While we started with an audacious headline goal—100,000 jobs created by 2025—our actual impact has been different. We’ve minted more than 1,200 entrepreneurial leaders, launched more than 140 companies, and impacted enterprises and communities in a multitude of ways. We need to invest in the data and case studies to understand how and where our program can be successful, as well as where it falls short so that we can change course as needed and replicate it in other contexts. This requires that we commit to truly holding up a mirror to ourselves—flaws and all.
New CEOs have a lot on their plates, and overcoming imposter syndrome is usually one of them. It took me at least a year to stop comparing myself to Andrew. Having his name appear regularly in my mainstream newsfeed didn’t make it easier for me to gain the confidence I needed to lead. But now, three years later, I’ve built a track record of accomplishments that include recruiting our largest and most-diverse classes in VFA’s history, while making fellowship recruitment increasingly selective and focusing on developing future founders. I know that the next chapter won’t be easy, but it will be built by looking forward, while honoring our founding principles.
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Read more stories by Amy Nelson.