Investing in Today’s Veterans …
The Bob Woodruff Foundation has the market cornered
By Todd Connor, CEO Bunker Labs
I served in the Navy after commissioning through ROTC at Northwestern University from 2000–2004. I loved my time in the Navy, and more so everyday in retrospect, where even the hard, tedious, or mundane days (you now know) taught you some of the most important lessons that now carry you forward. I never thought it would be a career for me.
Like so many others, I felt an obligation to give some part of my time in my life to serve, and had ambitions to do things afterwards.
When I left the Navy I went to business school, went into consulting, and followed a traditional path. But the traditional path was not for me. I had joined the Navy to do big things — not to be average — and as a veteran post-service I wanted to do bigger things yet. I always had a desire to start things, test ideas, test my own personal capacity.
It was not until business school that I saw the translation of that ambition and desire as being “entrepreneurship”. I eventually left corporate consulting and went on to start two different professional services businesses including a business I still own today.
Entrepreneurship, I had discovered, felt to me like the next best thing to serving in the military. As a Chicagoan who is active in the civic and entrepreneurship sectors, I started a conversation with 1871, one of the nation’s leading technology incubators, to ask them what they thought about engaging military veterans as an asset class for entrepreneurship.
I didn’t have an intent to start an organization, I certainly did not have an intent to start a national organization, but like a true entrepreneur I was lead by my own curiosity and my own assessment that the market needed a solution that had not yet been built in Chicago.
Those conversations lead quickly to us creating an organization called the Bunker Labs to help military veterans start and grow businesses. And as with other firsts in my life, I was now running a not-for-profit organization for military veterans. We had other veterans call and ask to replicate the model in their city, and since that announcement we have launched chapters in 6 cities with another 5 on the way.
I committed to creating a brand that was not condescending to veterans — that dared them to be good, smart, and capable as entrepreneurs. We committed to making our community a peer-led community of veterans-turned-entrepreneurs, and to making this a highly networked community. We would be friends first, and teachers second.
We would invite a diverse array of founders, and invite diverse partners to co-create this vision. And we committed that we would never put something in front of other veterans that we ourselves would not find of value. Our standard would be “would I choose to do this?” So with an ambitious brand, high standards, and a thriving peer lead community, we knew that we were on to something special.
What I did not know was how we would get the right partner to come alongside. All of our support and funding had come from corporate partners, none from the government or VSO sector. What we were doing resonated with the private sector but did not quite clique for some traditional veteran funders who expected something more… traditional.
Until we met the Bob Woodruff Foundation. Amazingly, they approached us having heard about what we were doing, and asked to understand our work. They checked in with our partners and veterans in our program, and came to visit — to look at it all in action.
They asked me what our next big goal was and I told them I wanted to build a gamified entrepreneur development platform where veterans could login from anywhere around the world, earn points, earn badges, and make connections by learning about entrepreneurship (huh!?), watching TED talks, going through best-in-class curriculum, and watching video interviews that we produced of veterans who successfully started their own businesses.
The Bob Woodruff Foundation got it. They really got it.
And they jumped in with our most significant investment to date.
In entrepreneurship we talk about innovators, early adopters, the chasm to the mass market, and laggards. Most partners want to play it safe as the mass market — not the first money in, and not the last money in — somewhere in the middle alongside the rest of the pack. But that’s not entrepreneurship, and that’s not (in one person’s opinion) leadership.
Taking risks, investing in people, and pushing for innovation are the cornerstones of successful entrepreneurs and they are the values that the Bob Woodruff Foundation lives. Trust me — it’s extraordinary, different, and exceptional.
If the Bob Woodruff Foundation was an early stage seed fund, they would realize some extraordinary returns as investors — they know how to listen to the marketplace and pick winners. Fortunately for our nation’s servicemembers, they are investors in veterans.
They are different by design. They know that the same challenges demand new solutions. They are innovators. They dare us to think bigger, deliver more impact, and to pour our passion into our work. They are entrepreneurs.
And if you are a veteran looking to start your own entrepreneurship journey, I hope you will give Bunker Labs a look and create a profile at BunkerinaBox.org — a tremendous resource powered by the Bob Woodruff Foundation.
