Bring Your Human to Work by Erica Keswin

Author:Erica Keswin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2019-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

Offer Your Specialty to a Community That Needs It: General Assembly

Like many young people, Jake Schwartz, CEO of General Assembly, struggled during his twenties with the question of what he was going to do with his life. He just couldn’t see how college had prepared him, and he felt lost. Eventually, channeling his personal frustrations, Schwartz created a coworking space for entrepreneurs who needed a place to both collaborate and feel connected. It wasn’t long before Schwartz’s space grew into something that felt more like a college campus, “a curated community where the ethos was learning by doing.”

The history of General Assembly, like the history of so many successful start-ups, is an organic one. When Schwartz first opened the doors to his coworking space, he asked his fellow entrepreneurs if anyone wanted to teach a class to other start-ups. While lots of folks volunteered to teach, not many people signed up to take the classes. This makes some sense as start-ups are notoriously lean on operations, and entrepreneurs can’t always take time or pay for training. But Schwartz realized that while entrepreneurs weren’t lining up to take classes from their fellow in-the-know business types, people in the general public were. An idea was born.

Today, General Assembly is no longer a coworking space. It has morphed into a fast-growing training ecosystem, known as GA, which is now a leading source for training, staffing, and career transitions with campuses in 20 cities and over 35,000 graduates worldwide. In a positive twist of fate, Schwartz built something that his younger self needed. For the college grad with passion and smarts but in need of just a little more training, support, and polish—have no fear, GA is here.

Clearly, Schwartz wasn’t the only one in need of a boost. The sizable market for GA-style training has helped them raise over $100 million in funding, and revenue has grown more than 40-fold since the company raised its Series A. With such success, Schwartz felt it was time to develop a distinct “social impact” arm of the company. Sure, everything GA does is for a good cause. But as a for-profit enterprise, Schwartz believed it was important to commit more explicitly to charitable giving, and with the same gusto for learning that’s baked into the entire GA business.

Schwartz began reflecting on how to give back, but something felt off. He walked me through his reflection process: “There was a problem of ‘who do you choose?’ Do we care about women? Do we care about minorities? Do we care about inner-city, at-risk youth? Do we care about veterans? What is our cause? And I realized that I didn’t want to have a cause that way. Because it just felt very myopic.”

Then it hit him. Schwartz realized that, for GA, “our real asset is not the little bit of charity that we could do. The real asset is the infrastructure that we have.” In other words, GA’s specialty is its ability to offer large-scale training for people in need.

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