Opinion: I Interviewed for Andrew Yang’s Nonprofit. It Was Demoralizing.

‘After an exercise in which we innovated a refrigerator to alert users when their food had gone bad, they handed out note cards and asked each of us to write down who we thought did the worst.’

Many believe that a fresh face and original thinker like Andrew Yang could be just the mayor New York needs to turn a corner. But my experience applying for a job at his nonprofit in 2015 when he ran it leads me to believe that he and those he would enlist to solve an affordable housing crisis, an overburdened public school system, and high unemployment would be missing a critical trait in their approach to that work: prioritizing empathy.

Before his 2020 presidential run, Yang founded and directed the organization Venture for America. Like Teach for America, but with entrepreneurship, Venture for America recruits the nation’s top graduating college students to work for start-ups in cities across the country that are struggling to rebuild themselves. In so doing, Yang sought to create an economic renaissance in these cities and attract talented young people to the cause. When I applied for the fellowship, I enthusiastically shared Yang’s goal. I had studied geography at Middlebury College because I wanted a career solving complex world problems. I was involved in my school’s entrepreneur center. I was about to spend my summer working at a start-up. I had the bug. Within a day, Yang’s interview process convinced me that I, many women, and empathetic people in general, had no place in entrepreneurship. And that feeling didn’t come when I got rejected: it came moments after I walked in the door.

The process involved a day-long interview in which we were grouped into teams of four or five and assigned a series of tasks that we were to complete in front of a panel of judges from corporate America. While I didn’t interact with Yang directly that day, my experience resonates with those shared by others who’ve worked with him who described the environment as largely catering to men.  Sitting around before the process began, which took place not in an entrepreneur center or start-up but a row of pristine Barclays skyrise suites in Midtown Manhattan, I noticed that I was one of only three or four female finalists. There were close to 20 men. I was placed in a group with four men and we made our way down the hall.

The first scenario assigned to us was that we ran a data storage start-up that housed the data of approximately 200 nonprofits and five hospitals. There was a breach and we could only save the nonprofits’ data, or the hospitals’ data. We had about five minutes to figure out which we would save while the judges took notes from the other side of the table. The man next to me said that we should save the nonprofits’ data because there were far more of them. Everyone else agreed. A few minutes later, I asked if we should reconsider. The nonprofits may have been our main clients, I thought to myself, but a hospital data breach could be far more damaging. The man who had taken on the role of ringleader told me it was too late to change our minds.

After each exercise came a round of questioning from the judges. “Did you think your team made the wrong choice?” one of them asked me. Here was my chance to let it rip. Instead, I choked. Later into the questioning process it became clear that the judges would not under any circumstances make facial expressions, nod, or give any other indications that what we were saying resonated with them. But this was the first exercise. What their stone-faced expressions told me as I was speaking was that I was saying something very wrong. “In the end I thought it was the right choice,” I walked myself into saying. The point was clearly for us to ignore their expressions and charge ahead, but I now know that my hesitation would have been common for many women, who, studies show, rely on facial feedback more than men. A classmate who got accepted to the program had advised me that they appeared to want applicants to be cutthroat, but the line of stony faces told me I’d better be nicer.

In an email, Venture for America’s COO Elizabeth Brake said that the organization has two reasons that Selection Day judges are instructed not to show any facial expression. The first is equity: they don’t want judges to appear more or less encouraging to any one candidate over the other. The second reason, she wrote, is that “we wish to create an environment in which the candidate’s own self awareness is what guides their behavior, not (potentially inaccurate) perceptions of what the judges want or don’t want to see based on perceived nonverbal feedback.”

These instructions—which were in all likelihood designed by Yang, like the rest of the program—may strive towards equity on the first front, but they reveal a troubling prescription for entrepreneurship and politics on the second. They suggest that Yang and those he chooses to work with believe that it’s a weakness to be sensitive to how others receive your words in a professional setting. You should offer your thoughts with gusto and go-ahead, so the reasoning goes, regardless of if the people you’re speaking to appear disconnected, withholding, and lifeless. This method disregards the importance of skills like empathy and emotional intelligence. To be divested from how someone responds to your ideas means that to some extent, you don’t care what they think or how they feel. In fact, many of the major defections by tech companies over the years happened because leadership wasn’t sensitive enough to what its own people were saying. Are these really the types of people we want fixing the public’s problems? Are they even equipped to?

Next, the judges invited us to turn on each other. After an exercise in which we innovated a refrigerator to alert users when their food had gone bad, they handed out note cards and asked each of us to write down who we thought did the worst. Most of my competitors chose me. When asked why by a judge, one of them said, “because she talked too much without saying much of anything.” The judge asked if others agreed. Most nodded. There I was, the only woman in a room of men, being told that I took up too much space and didn’t have anything important to say. This fixation on brevity appears to be shared by others in the industry. But I had already tried brevity. In the first exercise, my competitors told me that my one brief contribution came too late to be worth considering. This time, when I involved myself earlier and more often, I was told it was too much. Could it be that none of my contributions would have been valid to them? I wasn’t able to find out, because after their feedback, I apologized and stopped talking altogether for fear I had already said too much. Maybe Yang asked us to criticize each other because he was looking for people who could respond proactively to it, I thought. But their criticism demanded I shut up and sit there quietly, while they were free to take the floor for the remainder of the exercises that day. I did not get an offer. I heard that many of them did.

From their open floor space plans to the well-worn mantra that all good innovation stems from collaboration, start-ups are about working together. Yang’s Venture for America sought out indifference and antagonism instead. This may still get you ahead in some industries, but it seems strikingly out-of-line with where most companies are heading.

Such an ethic makes sense considering Yang’s goals for Venture for America. When he was in charge, he stated that his intent was to capture talented graduates who would otherwise pursue careers in investment banking by making entrepreneurship, as the website Vox described it, “just as prestigious and selective.” It’s certainly laudable that Yang sought to redirect the overwhelming number of elite graduates who vie for careers on Wall Street towards revitalizing America’s struggling cities instead. But by making his interviewing process mimic something that an investment bank might do, Yang recreated a culture that rewarded insensitivity and selected those who performed best in it. He tasked them with rebuilding Detroit and Baltimore. He enlisted them to build trust in those communities.

I don’t think that Yang’s interview design was born out of malice. My best guess is that it came from a belief that to solve pressing problems, we need people with excessive amounts of conviction. And we do. But conviction isn’t everything: compassion matters too. And without it, we will watch our companies—and our politicians—fail us.

Alexa Beyer is a freelance journalist and writer living in Los Angeles.