Amy Nelson is vice president of external relations at Venture for America, which Knight Foundation supports as part of its efforts to invest in Miami’s emerging innovators and entrepreneurs as a tool to build community, while fostering talent and expanding opportunity. Above: A 2015 Venture for America Training Camp at Brown University last month. Photo courtesy Venture for America. 

A year ago, Venture for America launched our program in Miami by sending six recent college graduates to work at growth companies like Cirle, Zeel, Rokk3r Labs and Kairos. Our inaugural Miami cohort is thriving, and we’re thrilled that they’ll be joined this month by eight new VFA Fellows headed to the Magic City.

We believe Miami is a great place to start a business – and that an influx of job-creating enterprises could change the city’s unemployment landscape. Our fellows are eager to learn from the experienced entrepreneurs who have set up shop in Miami, and when they’re ready to step out on their own, we support them with mentors, funding, talent and other resources to help their business take hold.

We want to encourage recent grads to create opportunities for themselves and others. So far, it’s working.

Seth Forsgren moved to Miami as part of the VFA Class of 2014 with a degree in molecular biology from Princeton. Along with getting his post-grad career off the ground, like most young people, he wanted to meet peers in the community – and, he hoped, get a few dates. He found the texting culture to be frustrating: How do you know if your messages are being well received or blown off? And beyond that, he realized that most texting platforms, along with other messaging apps, lacked moments of laughter, surprise, and meaning involved in face-to-face conversation.

Photo credit: Venture for America

With that in mind, he founded Tracks – an app that allows users to send video messages and captures the reaction of the viewer in real time. While it started as a solution to Seth’s dating quandary, it turns out lots of people wanted to communicate with friends and loved ones in a more meaningful way. Snapchat just doesn’t do it for everyone.

The most promising part of the story is that Seth has been able to raise seed capital in Miami, and plans to build a team locally. He’s relocated his cofounders to Miami Beach; they even won three months of free rent at WeWork’s new coworking space. They’ve officially launched their product, and are putting down roots in Miami for the long haul.

So why is Venture for America so vital in Miami? The perception in the media is often that millennials are flocking to startups in droves, but the reality is that new venture formation is at a 38-year low in the United States. People younger than 35 are less likely to start a business now than at any other time in recent history, yet startups account for nearly all new net jobs in this country. Unless we get more talented young people in the pipeline building companies, the future of job growth and economic diversification in Miami and other cities across the country looks bleak.

Joining with Knight Foundation and other like-minded individuals and organizations in the Miami startup community is one of the ways we can reverse this trend. These players are all contributing in different ways to growing the number of new businesses and increasing their odds of success. Our investment is for the long term, but we’re already starting to see the rewards. We look forward to getting to know more of you as we continue our work.