Fresh from leaving the team that I had been trying to start a company with for two years, I was in search of a new mission.
I loved what we had built with the CCC, but I often felt like I was not building for the community I truly wanted to support nor working towards the vision of what I wanted to see in the world. I also had doubts that I, as an aspiring CEO of a venture-backed startup, was pursuing the role best suited for me. I started to ask myself: “Who was the community I wished to serve? What was the vision I believed in? What was the right role for me?”
After my retreat in the winter, I set out to answer these questions before I would commit to a new mission.
Purpose Built VC
An opportunity to begin addressing these questions appeared when Tiffany Yau connected me to the team at Purpose Built venture studio. I hadn’t heard of the venture studio model before, but I was quick to see its advantages. Typically, early-stage venture capitalists invest in a startup after an idea has been developed and validated against a few key early indicators. The venture studio model, instead, initiates the investing relationship with the founder even earlier, before the startup idea has been fully formed.
To become an entrepreneur-in-residence (or EIR) at Purpose Built, you must first meet with the team and share your background, interests, skills, and goals. After this prospecting conversation, the Purpose Built team looks through their list of lightly-vetted startup ideas and pitches the ones they think would most resonate with the prospective founder. The potential founder can also pitch their own idea to Purpose Built, who would then vet the idea based on their screening rubric.
If the founder and studio align on an idea, the exploration phase begins. In this stage, the pair conducts desk research and field interviews to validate the idea’s potential. After a successful exploration phase, Purpose Built gives the founder a substantial stipend to fund them as they build a minimum viable product to garner early traction. As more success milestones are hit, the Purpose Built team will connect the founder to its network of investors if further fundraising is needed.
The venture studio model de-risks numerous aspects of the startup process and relegates extraneous obstacles like investor relations and founder salary so the founder can focus on validating the idea and building a business. Purpose Built’s streamlined approach coupled with the coaching from the studio’s two founders - Miles Lasater and Taylor Thompson - made me comfortable with the idea of giving up significant founder equity to participate. After our first meeting, Miles, Taylor, and I soon settled on a startup idea and I dove into the exploration phase.
The Problem
Though our economy continues to favor those with college degrees, national college enrollment has gone down for the 12th year in a row.
What’s especially concerning is the fact that many students opting out are those who would stand to gain the most from the social mobility promised by a college degree.
The most common complaints? These students and their families balk at higher education’s sticker price and question the return on investment, particularly as more and more students struggle to persist and graduate. Even before the pandemic years, which saw the steepest declines in enrollment, a 2019 Gallup poll found that only 51% of American adults believed a college education was “very important”, down 19 points from 70% in 2013. 84% of current students’ parents said they were “satisfied” with the existing options of four-year college, two-year college, or technical training programs for their child. However, nearly half said they wished there were more options available.
This data echoed what I saw in the world. Numerous peers I grew up with either did not enroll in college, struggled to graduate on time, or transferred schools. Even I, as a first-generation college student, struggled to transition into, and excel, at Duke. I often felt underequipped or underprepared in numerous ways, like not having suitable technology, knowing the “hidden curriculum” of navigating the school, or possessing certain academic foundations. This sudden awareness of my “lacks” manifested in persistent insecurity and imposter syndrome that led me to choices that, in hindsight, negatively impacted my educational trajectory, like switching majors and mentally checking out. These broader trends and my lived experience confirmed what I suspected: the higher education system is failing many people in America.
The Solution
So, what could we make that actually worked for people?
Miles, Taylor, and I focused on three key criticisms of traditional higher education: the lack of real-world experience, unpredictable labor market outcomes, and convoluted financing. Leaning on our team’s entrepreneurial backgrounds, we asked ourselves a question: instead of helping a student get a job, what if there was a trade school that helped a student launch a quickly profitable business? After a few iterations upon that question, a business idea emerged.
I found the idea intriguing. In many ways, this idea mirrored my own experience with Purpose Built. I, too, was learning how to build a startup through Purpose Built’s playbook, coaching, and instruction, with the goal of co-owning a business at the end. If Purpose Built’s model hooked me, could a similar model centered around viable and de-risked businesses excite those unenthused by college? The next step was to find out.
User Discovery
Purpose Built taught me that the best way to test a startup idea is to immediately speak to prospective customers. So, we made a goal to speak to 40 people, across of litany of personas relevant to our business idea.
The first category of people were potential students. We wanted to see if young adults actually found this idea interesting. This group included:
Students in their senior year
Recent high school graduates
Recent graduates of associate degree programs
Recent graduates struggling to find or sustain work
College dropouts
College students working part-time
After speaking with students, we wanted to determine whether “influencers” close to them would also support them in this endeavour. Influencers include folks like:
Parents
Teachers, counselors, school leaders
Youth and/or re-entry focused nonprofits and community organizations
Education Experts
Throughout the interviews, I saw people’s eyes perk up in excitement, which in turn got me excited about the idea. What stood out most, however, was how desperately students wanted an alternative to college where they could both earn a living wage and gain future financial security, elements they increasingly were not seeing in traditional higher education. The people most drawn to our idea were typically young men whose parents did not go to college. Usually, they were both ambitious and fiercely commited to supporting their families. Oftentimes, they were hustle-oriented and resourceful, but also emotionally guarded and struggling with motivation.
I saw so much of myself in them.
Should Strivers bet it all?
Here was a community I felt called to serve. I had a kindred connection with the people I interviewed. I started to call them “strivers” because of their intense desire to go beyond their present socio-economic circumstance and realize their dreams without much of a safety net underneath them. I intimately understood how an education system that promised but then failed to support a striver’s goals affected their self-esteem, drive, and future.
Strivers are everywhere. They’re not defined by gender, race, ethnicity, or even age. Strivers could be found in cities, rural areas, or in between. In fact, not only are there millions of Americans striving to attain their American Dream, but across the world, people are hustling and grinding to secure a flourishing life for themselves and their families. If I wanted to, I could support strivers my whole life.
The skills and experience around education, community building, and entrepreneurship I had cultivated over my career also positioned me to play a unique and potentially impactful role in tackling this problem. We were getting close to what Purpose Built called “founder-idea fit”.
Unfortunately, however, my own striver journey would end up being the thing that’d stop us. As I mentioned in the article on my entrepreneurial journey, I had de-prioritized career growth and financial security in order to take a chance on building a startup. That experience left me skeptical about whether someone my age and in my financial position should be taking a swing at novel business idea. Risk no longer seemed as appetizing to me as it did before. Yet, here I was again, excited about a startup idea that could take years to develop.
Like many of today’s strivers, I faced a choice between pursuing an interest or school. I was lucky enough to have the support and counsel of seasoned entrepreneurs and investors at Purpose Built, but our idea was leagues away from being a guarantee for success and social mobility for me and my family. To Miles’ and Taylor’s credit, they worked expeditiously with me to rapidly de-risk our idea before I needed to inform Stanford of my decision. We raced against the clock to gather enough information in order to equivocally say, “this will be a better bet than grad school.” But, considering the nature of startups, no matter how much the Purpose Built team wanted to move forward with the idea, by the deadline, they knew they could not conscionably make that call.
So, they asked me to make the decision. Take a swing and try building this business or go to graduate school?
I hemmed and hawwed over this. Ultimately, my decision came down to two key factors: 1) I owed it to my parents to go to graduate school, who had dreamt of me going to a school like Stanford for years, and had already seen me decline this option once; 2) I wanted more security than what this opportunity offered. I had a life to live and I did not feel solid enough to continue taking swings.
I struggled with decision, but ultimately walked away grateful. Exploring with Purpose Built had given me my new mission. My career’s next phase would be dedicated to supporting strivers and helping them attain financial security and well-being, while also building that for myself in the process. With this clarity, I could start making moves to make this mission a reality. At Stanford, I would have the time, opportunity, and guidance to make it happen. Let’s ride.