Enstitute Blog

THIRTY-SEVEN INDIVIDUALS TO RECEIVE A COLLECTIVE TOTAL OF OVER $2 MILLION IN SEED FUNDING TO AFFECT SOCIAL CHANGE.

New York, June 11, 2013 – Echoing Green today announced that Enstitute co-founders Kane Sarhan and Shaila Ittycheria are recipients of an Echoing Green 2013 Fellowship. Sarhan and Ittycheria are among 37 Fellows that will receive $2 million in seed funding as well as training, mentorship and consulting opportunities to affect positive social change. Selected from a pool of 2,872 applications, the 2013 Fellows represent just one percent of all applicants.

“We’re very excited and humbled to be Echoing Green Fellows,” said Sarhan. “Echoing Green’s support will help us drive Enstitute’s mission to redefine higher education forward.” Echoing Green’s funding will enable Enstitute to increase its number of teaching hubs in support of its mission to graduate 500,000 students from its entrepreneur apprenticeship program by 2025. “We expect Echoing Green’s funding to be catalytic,” remarked Ittycheria. “The support and resources Echoing Green gives to its fellows is unprecedented.”

“The 2013 Fellowship classes are the outcome of the twenty-five years of growth in the social entrepreneurship sector since the birth of Echoing Green,” said Cheryl L. Dorsey, president of Echoing Green and 1992 Fellow. “The organization is behind some of the most successful, innovative social change organizations in the world. In our anniversary year, we continue to invest in bold new solutions to our world’s greatest challenges.”

“The potential for our new class of Fellows is limitless,” remarked Dave Hodgson, managing director of General Atlantic, Echoing Green co-founder and current board chair. “These key influencers are a true testament to the impact that innovative problem-solving can have on our world’s greatest challenges”

For a complete list of Echoing Green’s 2013 Fellowship class click here.

About Echoing Green:
Founded in 1987 by global growth equity firm, General Atlantic, Echoing Green unleashes next generation talent to solve the world’s biggest problems. To date, Echoing Green has invested over $31 million in seed funding in more than 500 social entrepreneurs (Echoing Green Fellows) and their innovative organizations across the globe. Recognized Echoing Green Fellows include the founders of Teach For America, City Year, College Summit, Citizen Schools, One Acre Fund, and SKS Microfinance. Further, Echoing Green drives social innovation by taking the stories, frameworks, research, and lessons of its Fellows and the field of social innovation in order to inspire a generation of young people to build meaningful, impact-driven careers. Additional information can be found by visiting www.echoinggreen.org.

About Enstitute:
Enstitute is a competitive, affordable and scalable model of apprenticeship-based higher education that is building a pathway to success for students who do not excel in a traditional college environment, or cannot afford college tuition. Enstitute’s apprenticeship-based model turns startups and small businesses into classrooms. The two-year program pairs students with established entrepreneurs at high-growth companies in technology, digital media and the non-profit sector. Enstitute successfully completed the first year of its New York pilot. The program will open three new hubs next year and is on track to graduate 500,000 students by 2025.

I’m honored to write about this week’s dinner guest, Drake Baer. His visit felt very different from most – Drake enraptured each of the 11 fellows listening at the dinner table. Drake has a keen way of telling stories – magical stories, in fact – that I’ll humbly attempt to re-create in my own words. As an accomplished contributor to Fast Company, Drake has a unique perspective on writing. It has developed through and benefited from his backpacking in Prague after college and ending up in Seoul after two years exploring, not only the wilderness, but also himself. Drake shared his compelling story with the fellows, marking this dinner as one of the most inspiring and bizarre dinners in Enstitute history.

“You have to have a healthy relationship with your own ignorance”

I heard Drake explain as I sat down for dinner. He began to elaborate further, and explained that we have to accept the fact that we’re all inherently ignorant, especially at the beginning of a process (usually a goal). We can’t help it. For example, while writing this blog, I sat down bitterly aware of how horrid my first draft really was. I was OK with that. If I were to trick myself into thinking that because I can’t write a finished piece in one sitting that I’m a bad writer, then I would simply not write at all. Drake provided great examples of how ignorance can play into success.

For example, Drake mentioned Jeremy Stoppleman and his process of building Yelp from a five person team to a multimillion dollar publicly traded entity. Stoppleman started Yelp with the idea that reviews for restaurants would best spread by word of mouth. Not until 2007, nearly three years after Yelp launched in 2004, did Stoppleman consider allowing users to write reviews and comments on the site without a prompt generated by Yelp. Had Stoppleman known that Yelp wasn’t going to be a success at first, he may have never started the $137 million publicly traded local directory service (with social networking and user reviews) that Yelp is today.

One tremendous example of ignorance stands out in my life: I moved to New York City after high school, not to go to college, but instead, to be part of the first class of Enstitute. Keep in mind that Enstitute was “E[nstitute]” back then, and it was very different from the Enstitute I know now. At E[nstitute], on move-in day on a sunny, breezy afternoon in September, there was no guarantee of a thriving program filled with valuable connections and mentors. There was no guarantee of anything, really; there was no guarantee of the program existing. Nevertheless, I decided it would be most valuable for me to convince my parents that this was a truly remarkable once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. My parents were convinced, so we packed the car, drove to New York City, and I (ignorantly, mind you) moved into what would be Enstitute and called it my new home. That is the most valuable decision I’ve made in my life, and it took a considerable amount of ignorance to get there.

Drake conveyed our need to accept the fact that we aren’t perfect; we’re all irrational human beings after all. We need to embrace our ignorance at times by using it as a catalyst to achieve our goals. Whether this goal is to write a story, start a company, or build the world’s largest tower of doughnuts, we all need to embrace our ignorance and use it to our advantage. After all, we’re gonna need it.

This brings me to another valuable mantra of Bear’s, discovered while conversing with a middle-aged Frenchman:

“Making decisions is not just choosing one thing; making decisions is the process of not choosing millions of others.”

When I heard Drake explain this, I immediately put down my fork and stopped eating. “Damn,” I thought to myself. “This guy’s legit.”

Making decisions is no easy task, and we’re bombarded with hundreds, even thousands of them every day. Decision making is a skill that I’m constantly looking to improve.

When I think about eliminating options in the decision making process, I’m reminded of a sculptor. I do not see the greedy sculptor who won’t stop creating, but the diligent sculptor who constantly chips away the unnecessary until he’s left with a beautiful, simple piece of artwork. That’s what the decision making process is, after all: chipping away the unnecessary and deciding what you really need or want.

“Business is really fast and government is really slow”

I heard this and began to choke on my red potatoes. This time, he’s really made a point.

Think about it. Government, and large institutions for that matter, can’t keep up with business. Products that empower the people will inevitably come first – it comes down to the fact that people will simply no longer rely on larger institutions because smaller, and more agile alternatives will exist. If government, bureaucracy, and large industries are cruise-ships, then small businesses are sail boats made of match sticks: although fragile, these lightweight businesses are more agile, risk averse, and prone to reacting faster to changes in the current marketplace.

“I’m most interested about how people and personalities affect a product.”

This strongly resonates with me. I’m lucky enough to work with a brilliant team at Betterment, and with that comes being able to observe how brilliance translates into a tangible product. With almost 30 team members, Betterment has created a product with its own personality, and has grown to $130,000,000 assets under management while doing so – all while enlightening one user at a time.

I look at this as a reminder that selling a product for profit is the old business, creating a product that touches its customers through emotion is the new. It’s a reminder to constantly think about how businesses and products make people feel, and finally, recognize that we’re making stuff for humans. We’re making stuff for these terribly indecisive and irrational beings that I’ve been telling you about.

Drake never exactly told me why he chose Prague after college. He mentioned something about the melancholic atmosphere: “All of the gorgeous people, crying into their beers… I wanted that,” he explained. And I think I understand. Maybe one of these days, I can end up in Prague as well, beer in hand, tears aflow.

This post was written by Connor Lee who is apprenticing with Jon Stein at Betterment. You can visit his blog here: Connor.ly