Baltimore hosted Venture for America’s regional job fair connecting new fellows and startups

Venture for America’s 2019 job fair for the northeast region was held Friday, May 3, at the R. House Garage in Baltimore’s Remington neighborhood, welcoming 50 incoming 2019 fellows for interviews with 34 companies.

Venture For America is a fellowship program that is focused on creating economic opportunity in American cities by mobilizing the next generation of entrepreneurs and equipping them with the skills and resources they need to create jobs. For the fellows, this begins by working with startups in cities like Baltimore, Detroit and St Louis. The job fair kicked off a part of this process for the northeast region.

Local companies like Leverege, ByteLion, and Rendia were hiring for a variety of roles from product manager to customer success, enabling the fellows who will join their team to help build the company while learning first-hand about entrepreneurship. Fellows in this year’s cohort are graduating from universities such as Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Duke, Stanford and the University of Maryland.

VFA has worked in Baltimore since 2013. It now hosts the program’s second-largest cohort of fellows and alumni. Teh roster of more than 100 fellows who completed the program and remained in the city also includes some who have gone on to start new companies. It’s the third time the regional job fair was hosted in the city.

“Not only is this fair a great opportunity to showcase Baltimore startups, it’s a fantastic way to introduce recent college grads to our great city and the robust network available to them if they start their professional career in Baltimore,” said Josh Russakis, VFA’s director of Baltimore.

Fellows were welcomed with an introduction from Jacob Hsu, CEO of Catalyte who shared valuable insights into the value of solving big problems through entrepreneurship over solely passion. Fellows were also given a taste of the Baltimore neighborhood where the job fair was held, by Thibault Manekin, cofounder of Seawall Development, which has taken the lead on development project such as R. House.

With another successful job fair, VFA is looking forward to welcoming another group of passionate young fellows to the Baltimore community this fall.