工作经历造就参与总统竞选理由

After getting a law degree, I spent five unhappy months as a corporate attorney. I left the job and worked at a few start-ups before becoming the CEO of an education company that focused on preparing college students for admissions tests. At that company, I saw firsthand the best and brightest all preparing for the same degrees and jobs. They'd get an MBA and then work for a management consulting firm, or a JD and then work at a law firm. With my own experience in the back of my mind, I knew that this wasn't a good move.

So, in 2011, I started Venture for America, a nonprofit that placed recent graduates in cities such as Birmingham, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Detroit -- giving them the chance to support local businesses and create jobs in these areas. I wanted to create a path for smart young people to go out and build things, not toil away on corporate mergers that just shifted money from one millionaire's account to another.

We picked these towns because they were struggling by most obvious measurements. They had lost manufacturing jobs to automation and were facing high levels of economic insecurity, unemployment and drug overdoses. However, looking at these numbers on a spreadsheet was very different from stepping off of a plane and seeing these struggling communities in person. I thought, "I can't believe I'm still in the same country."

Many American lives and families are falling apart. Rampant financial stress is the new normal. We are in the third or fourth inning of the greatest economic shift in the history of mankind, and no one seems to be doing anything significant in response to it. In short, we're leaving our children a country that's worse than the one we inherited.