Kauffman Foundation: New Year, New Strategy, New Team

They say 2016 was a year of change. For me, this was especially true.

Ten months ago, after nearly a decade in Silicon Valley, I packed up with my family our assorted belongings, realizing too late that half of our stuff apparently consisted of toys. We moved from the western edge to the heart of America, literally from the end of the frontier to its beginning. We now live just steps away from the original California Trail in Kansas City, where I serve as Vice President of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation. It’s been a thrilling and welcome adventure.

Why did I do it, many people have asked? Why take the leap? The answer is easy.  I consider Kauffman one of the most important institutions in the world. When offered the chance to lead its entrepreneurship work, I had to come. 

To me, Kauffman is more than a foundation, it’s a steward of the new economy. If you believe that entrepreneurs are the main force driving our economic well-being, which I do, then Kauffman has been the epicenter. It has empowered and supported so many high-impact initiatives for entrepreneurs over the years. Just to name a few: the JOBS Act (legalizing equity crowdfunding), Global Entrepreneurship Week (16,000 organizations celebrating in 160+ countries), Startup Weekend (193,000 alumni), AngelList (over $163 million raised for startups in 2015), and Entrepreneurs’ Organization (12,000+ entrepreneurs in 50 countries). And there’s so much more.

Kauffman transcends any individual or group, business or trend, or politics of the moment. With an endowment that will probably last for centuries, Kauffman can lead and invest for the greater good by advancing entrepreneurship and education, without bias, fear, or short-termism. It’s heady work, and humbling.

With the advent of the new year, I want to share the new direction that Kauffman is moving, plus brag a little about the amazing team that we’re building here. We are putting in place an ambitious strategy that targets some of the biggest challenges in entrepreneurship. Our overarching goal is to reverse national trends by increasing rates of entrepreneurial starts and successes.  Our strategy to get there has four main pillars.

First, entrepreneurial education. The ways that people learn are changing fast, and entrepreneurship education needs to change too. To address this, we are building an immersive, interactive community for entrepreneurs to learn from one another and better solve problems together. As a first step, we are integrating Kauffman resources that have previously been disparate—namely FastTrac (over 200,000 alumni), 1 Million Cups (over 100 cities), Founders School, and the entrepreneurship.org website—into a single community. Our ultimate vision is that people who are starting or building their companies anywhere can easily access the best learning opportunities, whether online or offline, structured or unstructured, internally sourced or externally created by other organizations. Stay tuned, we’ll have a lot more to share in the coming year.

Second, entrepreneurial ecosystems. One of the major recent trends in entrepreneurship is the increasing importance of “ecosystems.” It’s based on the realization that entrepreneurs thrive best in supportive, interconnected, pay-it-forward communities, rather than isolated silos. However, “ecosystem thinking” is still a fuzzy concept. It’s missing the common vocabulary, tools, and metrics of a true discipline. So that’s what we’re tackling at Kauffman—we want to help professionalize the discipline of ecosystem-building. We’re gathering exemplary ideas, experiences, and data from around the world. Then we’re synthesizing them into a “Kauffman Playbook” that will be universally available, easily implementable for practitioners, and continually refreshed. We’re convening a major conference on building ecosystems: our ESHIP Summit in June 2017. We’ll announce new experiments on ecosystem-building too.

Third, market gaps. While new technologies have created great entrepreneurial opportunities, there are still many who have been left out. The market leaves huge gaps. Research shows that certain segments of society face bigger barriers to entrepreneurship, whether such barriers are socioeconomic, demographic, sectoral, or geographic (including in Kansas City and the Midwest). We’ve already started tackling these gaps in our Kauffman Inclusion Challenge, which awarded $4.3 million this past year to 12 outstanding national organizations that are trying new ways to address systemic gaps for women and minority entrepreneurs. We will expand this work in years to come, targeting other barriers, working with a variety of partners, and experimenting with new techniques. Our ultimate vision is that entrepreneurs with great ideas should face “zero barriers to start up.”

Finally, big ideas. We’re not fulfilling our potential if we’re not translating pathbreaking ideas into practical action. Kauffman has a special role in advancing two essential aspects of society: entrepreneurship and education.  In this light, I think of Kauffman like DARPA. We’re no different than a venture fund or a research agency that has been charged with generating practical impact by convening great people, finding bold new ideas, and funding them smartly. Kauffman should be the “mecca” for engaging the best thinkers and doers in our field. We are in the fortunate position of being able to take ambitious, creative, risky, long-term bets.  But we need to do so with discipline. That means a consistent strategic narrative, industry-leading research, rigorous portfolio management, streamlined processes, measurable data, and syndication with great partners. Our goal in entrepreneurship is that if someone comes up with a breakthrough idea to help entrepreneurs, Kauffman should be their first call, always.

One of the sayings I learned from design thinkers at Stanford is “one should never go hunting alone.” That means you need a team. I’m absolutely thrilled that we have a fantastic team that we are growing even further. I want to brag about them a bit.

With the new year, we are unifying our internal teams in entrepreneurship programs, research, and policy.  This is a big deal for us, because it means we are strengthening the linkage between our amazing research capabilities and practical outcomes for entrepreneurial success.  I’m grateful to the talented research and policy associates who have helped shape this new, critical path forward. 

In addition, to go after these ambitious strategies, we are building our team. So, we recruited some rockstars to join us in recent months.

Philip Gaskin is our Director of Entrepreneurial Communities, where he leads our group on building effective entrepreneurial ecosystems and overcoming market gaps. Previously, he was Chief Operating Officer and Director of East Coast Operations at Mission Hub, which runs the Social Capital Markets conference and the global network of Impact Hub co-working spaces. Gaskin was also a political campaign director for Senator Cory Booker and President Obama. Before then, he was Senior Vice President, Global Strategy for the travel division at BCD Group, where he led a 400-person, $1 billion multinational business unit. 

Mark Beam is our first Maverick-in-Residence, where he is building a residence program for Kauffman and leading our convening and engagement strategy. Prior to joining the Foundation, Mark co-designed and co-developed Halloran Philanthropies, a pioneering international philanthropic and impact investment organization that made early foundational investments in Kiva, B-Corporation, and Impact Hub and other investments in the U.S., India, Mexico, Columbia and Brazil. Mark is a board member for several organizations, including the Buckminster Fuller Institute and CATAPULTA.

Andy Stoll has joined Kauffman as a Senior Program Officer, where he is responsible for the implementation and management of our ecosystem strategy and grant portfolio. Before joining us, Andy was an ecosystem-building consultant at the Bohemian Foundation, where he served as a key member of the founding team for the Music District, a new music ecosystem-building nonprofit organization. He also is the co-founder of six entrepreneurial-focused organizations, most recently the Startup Champions Network, the nation’s first professional association for full-time innovation ecosystem-builders.

Hillary Beuschel is a Senior Program Officer, where she works across our department to develop, implement, and monitor department-wide processes for entrepreneurship grantmaking. Prior to joining Kauffman, Hillary was a program officer with the H & R Block Foundation and Marion and Henry Bloch Family Foundation. In these roles, she was responsible for the foundations’ grantmaking within the areas of human services, neighborhood revitalization, and arts and culture throughout Kansas City, including representing the foundations on the Greater Kansas City Homelessness Task Force and others.

There are other new faces too, including our intrepid new executive assistant Veronica Solis, who has jumped in quickly and made a real contribution. It’s exciting to watch a team come together. 

We are still looking for killer talent to join Kauffman in research/policy, ecosystem building, and more. Check out our careers page, which is updated frequently.

As a final note, we need your help. I remind our team constantly that entrepreneurship happens on the ground. That means you. Entrepreneurship is bottom-up, where the micro interactions of millions of individuals shape macro effects in the world. Our work must be entrepreneur-centric. That’s why we have started to increase our engagement with practitioners, even reinventing our RFP process from scratch. That’s why we are implementing design thinking, so that we are attuned to the real needs of real people generating real impact. That’s why we hit the road recently to talk with genuine entrepreneurs and ecosystem-builders in the Heartland. 

So, Kauffman can’t do it alone. We need your boldest ideas. We need your courageous experiments. We need your creative stretching. And we need your brave patience and good faith. Together, as Mr. Kauffman said, there is nothing we can’t conquer.