70MillionJobs: First Job Board to 70 Million Americans With Criminal Records

Adrienne Hatter

Employment Specialist / Partnership Strategist

Experience includes marketing/content management, strategic partnerships, and business outreach

Richard Bronson and his team are uniquely able to tackle the problem affecting 20% of the US population in a simple and effective way. 70 Million Jobs is one of the most exciting new opportunities for me because it changes lives and helps everyone become part of the solution. Thank you guys for solving a real program and giving people hope again!

Dr. Susan Amat

Founder/CEO of Venture Hive

Hunter Williams Partner in a global strategy consulting firm (retail & consumer industry focused). Based in China (Shanghai) for 7+ years. Father of 3.

Investor Q&A

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What does your company do?

One in three Americans live with criminal records. That's 70 million people. And most of these 70 million Americans experience pain when they try to reintegrate into the workforce. As an ex-convict myself, I wanted to serve my brothers and sisters in and out of the prison when I was released. That's how I got to building the first job board for the formerly incarcerated.

Where will your company be in 5 years?

At first, my goal was to be responsible for one million men and women having an opportunity – maybe for the first time in their lives – to truly live the American dream. The human being in me would be happy if there were even just one but the businessman in me wants a bigger number. Ultimately, 70MillionJobs' goal is to become a billion-dollar business that will pump in 70M people back into the US economy and introduce them to necessary services, like banking and healthcare.

What does 70 Million Jobs do?

70 Million Jobs is the first for-profit employment platform for Americans with criminal records. Companies pay us to post and market job opportunities that they are willing to consider people with criminal records for. The applicants themselves pay us nothing.We are assisting the largest employers in the country at a time of historically low unemployment. As Trump does away with a lot of illegal immigrant labor, there are huge pressures to fill jobs, particularly at the lower end of the wage scale. Big retailers like Walmart and Target and Lowe's can't get enough people to work on their sales floors, and big food-service companies, hospitals, warehousing, transportation companies are dying for people to come work for them. Some companies are also interested in asserting their leadership as being second-chance friendly, meaning to show they're willing to go into a community and hire people who have a record and could really use a break, people who have paid the price of their mistakes in the past and are ready to get on with a new productive life. These companies feel that this could represent some of the best things that this country stands for and have an understanding that we all make mistakes and that if you've done your time and paid the price, you should have the opportunity to move on with your life, particularly if you were very young at the time that you made the mistakes. Because who really believes that folks should have a life sentence for mistakes made often when they were very young?

Where did the idea for the company come from?

The story begins on a personal note. I used to work on Wall Street with some big companies. I did very well and made a lot of money. I was actually a partner at the infamous Wolf of Wall Street firm, Stratton Oakmont, and was involved with all of that.I then started my own financial services firm and grew it into a business with 500 employees generating about $100 million in annual revenue. Unfortunately, some of what I did was crooked and despite having paid back every penny that was taken from people, I was still rightfully prosecuted and rightfully punished. I received a two-year sentence in federal prison. I served 22 months and then two months in a halfway house. I had been a successful businessman with a lot of money and lots of opportunities. Then when I came out of prison, like most people who go through the criminal justice system, I was essentially destitute. I had no money, no place to live, no job, no prospects. Thank God I had a sister with a couch. It took me years of trying to get back on my feet and on with my life. Despite how hard it was for me, I knew that I was relatively lucky, because I was a white man in white corporate America who had a college education. The guys I lived with in prison were primarily men of color who maybe hadn't completed high school. They have very little shot because so many people who are released from jail or prison will fairly quickly get re-arrested and end up back there. The only people who don't get in trouble again are people who have jobs. I worked as director of a prominent non-profit in the prisoner re-entry space called Defy Ventures, which is based in New York and very active in the Bay Area. They work with men and women in prison to train them in entrepreneurialism so they can start their own business and take control of their financial future. I had a lot of responsibilities, including helping with job readiness and job placement. That’s when I started learning the facts and what it would take to get people jobs and eradicate the endless cycle of recidivism that destroys lives at great economic cost. I eventually became convinced that despite the good work that this and other non-profits were doing, almost all of them have never really succeeded in scaling. They're almost all very local. It's because they have to constantly be finding donations and grants to survive, so a lot of resources go into that, and they generally don't employ technology and therefore ultimately haven't been successful in scaling and really reaching the kind of impact that I was interested in doing. I felt like this was crying out for a for-profit approach. With that in mind, I left my job and launched 70 Million Jobs in New York in 2017. The city of Los Angeles reached out almost immediately asking me to partner with them to help drive greater opportunity for that city's formerly incarcerated. I was then accepted at Y Combinator that summer. After receiving venture capital funding and angel funding, I decided to remain in San Francisco to run the business.

How have your numbers grown since the launch in 2017?

This is a classic chicken or egg situation: You need to have enough applicants so companies want to engage with you to fill jobs, but you need enough companies offering jobs to get the applicants. Which do you go for first? The first thing I focused on was the applicant side. It’s very difficult to market to the population of ex-convicts despite its size. In fact, there is no company that really markets any goods or services to this population. There’s no central repository of data available and often these are people who want to stay below the radar. That represented a challenge for me, but it also represented a great business opportunity. If I could figure out how to access these users on a large scale and be successful in getting them jobs, I'd be in a position to sell them a wide variety of products and services, things like housing, banking services, and medical care. That’s how the business could eventually expand beyond jobs. My first focus has been on getting good at employment and to build a community. We already have more than one million active job seekers in our community. We get them in a variety of ways. We work with some of the largest background-check companies and they refer applicants to us. These are people who failed their background check and didn't get a job they applied for. They are then referred to us, and we are in a position to send them to a place where they might get the job. We also have relationships with many of the largest and most prominent non-profits and community organizations around the country and parole and probation departments. We work with companies that work with lots of friends and family of people who are incarcerated. We work inside the correctional system where they help distribute leaflets and posters about us. When people come out, we want to be a part of their re-entry strategy. We've been incredibly fortunate because the publicity we've generated has brought us a lot of applicants. There have been lots of magazine articles. And just in this past week, I was approached by 60 Minutes to appear on TV with them. I was also approached by Shark Tank and I'm talking to them soon. And I will be presented at South by Southwest in March.I think it has a lot less to do with ... I have an interesting story and I recognize that. But this is a real hot space that nobody is really approaching it the way we are. And we've achieved a certain scale that makes sense for large national employers who are looking for big national solutions to their HR needs, which we uniquely can address.

What has been the response from employers so far?

We’ve only had the requisite amount of job applicants for the last couple of months to be able to go to national employers and explain how we can deliver hiring solutions. We've already signed up a bunch of big employers and we have many more that will be announced. We're getting a better response than I expected. I had no idea what to expect. No one's ever done this as a for-profit business or with a recruiting model. I’d also never done anything like this, so there was a lot we had to discover. Plus, and I notice this in my own life, that attitudes towards the criminal justice system and the fact that it doesn't work very well is about the only thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on. The truth is that one in three adults has a criminal record. Almost everybody has been directly affected by entering the criminal justice system or knows somebody who has. That tends to humanize people's attitudes. People who commit crimes aren’t just all evil misanthropes. It's sometimes my dad, my uncle, or my cousin. That’s been positive to experience. It’s just coincidental that our economy is in a position where companies desperately need people, so while they wouldn’t have considered this population in the past, now they are more open.

What is your system for connecting people and jobs?

I originally launched the business thinking that a job board would be the right product to fit the market. There's already a job board for every career in every industry, so why not for people with criminal records? But early on I discovered that it's a lousy fit because it doesn't work for our users. For the most part, our users don't own laptops. And job boards are an awful user experience even if you have your own computer. The boards are cumbersome, complicated, and time-consuming, and they only really help the most motivated to slog through that system. The people we’re reaching only have phones. I imagine very few of them know how to upload a resume on their phone. They're not particularly tech savvy and they don't know people who have gone hunting for legitimate jobs who they can copy. They don't know what's involved and don’t know about job boards like Indeed. They can’t network at events to find employers. It’s all completely alien to them. Their experience is going out on the street because that's where their friends are. Those friends are making money, having fun, getting high, and listening to music. That’s what they want to be doing instead of going to a job interview at a fast food place for minimum wage.We just signed up Unilever, for example, and they have business operations in lots of markets throughout the country. We can first filter our community based on geography and then begin a campaign that starts with targeted emails. Then we have text notifications of job alerts, and then we get on the phone and we contact possible job candidates. That’s where we have a great deal of success in conveying what the opportunity may be. Next, we are helping them create a resume if they don't have one, and helping them apply for the job and going through the process with them. We remind them of their interview date or tell them about any hiring events an employer might have. So while a casual visitor to our site would see a job board, that really reflects maybe 1% of our real activity. We're also working on a new site which, among other things, will enable an applicant to create a video resume. If you looked at some of our user's paper resumes, you would cry, because they have no experience and they have no education. It's a sad representation of their life. However, if you watch a video resume, you could see that they're personable and bright and communicative and you'd be much more likely to hire them because we've humanized them.

How are you vetting job applicants?

There are lots of laws that constrict the kind of things we can ask applicants. Many places have done what is called banning the box. Some companies don’t even ask on the application if a person has ever been convicted of a felony, which is what companies routinely went on. That has been outlawed in many places. Each city and state has its own laws relating to what you can ask a job applicant and what you cannot ask. Generally speaking, you can ask someone to submit to a background check and you can get the results that way. Or, if you are prepared to make a bona fide offer, only then can you ask about any criminal background information. We can't ask those questions either, as much as we'd like to. Then, every company has its own criteria on what it can accept and what it can't. It might be that it has to be six years since the person committed the crime, or that it couldn't have been a violent crime with a weapon, or it couldn't have been a sex crime. We don't get paid if we don't send them someone who doesn't fall into their acceptance criteria. So as much as we'd like to be able to vet them and get that kind of information, we can't by law. The law isn't serving its real purpose and maybe it'll change, but in the meantime, we pursue the strictest level of compliance that we possibly can. What we can do is place advertising and send emails about job opportunities. In those, we can mention what is not acceptable to the employer. Some of these jobs involve driving, so we can say they can’t have a drunk driving conviction within the last four years. We can say no felony convictions within the last seven years. We can ask them questions about any work experience they may have, and we can certainly make judgments based on our conversations with them. Some of the jobs require them to lift boxes and work in a warehouse. Can they lift something that weighs 70 pounds? Do they have any computer experience? We're trying to find out as much as we can within the confines of the law. Ultimately these people are going to go for an interview and they're going to have to do a background check anyway, because that's just what any company does. We try to be as responsive as possible on an ongoing basis. Our existence depends on us providing ongoing HR solutions.

How many users have you placed in jobs?

It's hard to say, but it’s more than 100 people. In addition to the jobs from clients that we have directly contracted with, on the site now we have thousands of other jobs that come from a variety of different job boards. We want to make as many opportunities available to people who visit our site as possible. We, unfortunately, don't know when they apply for those jobs. It goes through a third party like ZipRecruiter, CareerBuilder, or Indeed. We just know people visited our site searching for jobs, but we don't know if they've clicked on a job and pursued it. We're in an interesting kind of business. Unlike most companies that are primarily committed to making money that will eventually sell or go public, I am interested in building a big successful business and exiting it. That's part of my plan. We are also interested in doing a great deal of social good. Every day that we get somebody a job, we feel that we've had a business success. Maybe we didn't sign up any new clients, but if we got a couple of people jobs today then we feel pretty damn proud. We know that often that job could have saved a life and certainly helped a family. It feels great, and I can't help but believe some of these same people would be interested in owning a little piece of the business and feeling like they're supporting it.

What’s next for you after this fundraising campaign?

Not only is 70 Million Jobs a mission-driven enterprise that resonates with everybody, but there is a big business potential here. That's how we become a $1 billion business. We have to become really good with employment and build a loyal following of people we've helped get jobs. Amazon started selling books, then they sold music, then they started selling everything. We’re on a similar path. We're hyper-focused on employment, but in the longer-term plan, we're going to be selling a lot of other stuff because we'll be in a position to sell to our community of clients.

Why are you raising money now?

Right now my runway is six or seven months, and I'd like it to be longer. There are certain things I would like to do and certain people I would like to bring on to really light the fire for us. I’d like to get a few more salespeople and a few more marketing people who can reach out to community organizations so we can expand our base on both sides of the marketplace. I also want a couple of more developers so we can build out some cool stuff that we have in mind. Personnel is our primary expense now, so that's where the money would be going.

Who makes up your team?

Aside from me, we have Seth Sundberg, a new hire who used to be a professional basketball player and is very well known in the Bay Area. He's very tall and recognizable, but he’s also known for having gone through a local community organization and starting his own business. He's a frequent public speaker and very knowledgeable in the prisoner re-entry space. We also have two salespeople and two marketing people. We have a CTO, a director of operations, and we have me. And that's the team. They are all incredibly committed people. We're having a lot of fun, and good stuff is happening. So it seems like this is the time to raise some money. It started with just me. I went to Y Combinator alone, and I couldn't write a line of code. I'm also 63 years old, so I was as much of an outlier as possible. I think they love my mission, but to a certain extent, they didn't quite know what to make of me.

What role does the company have in the broader effort on prison reform?

Prison reform is desperately needed, but re-entry reform is needed as well. I feel like I am perhaps somewhat qualified as someone who has had success in business and then been an abject failure. What the American Association of Retired People is to retired people is what we can be for people with criminal records. They are at the epicenter of reforming thought on the political discourse, of advocacy, of commerce, all of the issues that relate to that population. I see that same kind of holy union between doing good work and doing good business. That's an increasingly attractive model that more and more companies are considering. Companies are recognizing that it's not mutually exclusive to be humane and take care of your employees benignly and put customers ahead of anybody else. They also have to have a responsibility to the community and the earth. That’s the approach that we have here. We work very hard. I'm used to being rich and successful. I'm neither currently, and I aim to change that. But I also feel that I discovered my life's work late in life. I consider every man and woman who's been in prison or currently is in prison as my brother and sister. I think most people who have done time probably feel that as well. I go into prisons to speak, and I feel sad when I leave. Rather than being glad to leave, I feel like I'm deserting my brothers and sisters.

After the user has been signed on to a job, are there any support services that you offer?

No, we don't, no more than LinkedIn or Indeed does. Our clients do need training and counseling, substance abuse help, and family support, but all of that is enormously high touch and it doesn't scale. There's also already a huge network of these non-profits, plus parole departments, that work with people who come out of prison. But nobody is working with the people who have been out three years or five years or 11 years. The people who have been out a few years generally are in good shape other than desperately needing a job. That’s why I came to believe and continue to believe that this plan would be the way to get people jobs and create the best business opportunity. Since we're working with a low fee, we've got to move people through our recruitment business quickly. My personal goal is to find jobs for one million people. That's my number. If that’s done, then we will have dramatically moved the needle in this country.

What has been your biggest challenge so far?

All business is challenging. I'm an old guy, and I don't expect things to be easy. I'm distrustful of things that are easy. So when something is hard, to me it's good because that's the way it's supposed to be. I wouldn't know how to accept easy success. I'd be very suspicious of it. So it hasn't been terribly hard yet. At times, it can be hard for me because I'm not a technical person, and I have to make hires and technical decisions sometimes. I know that there are things that I just don't know. And I know I don't know what I don't know. That’s a frustrating position to be in, and it puts me at a disadvantage. But I'm finding incredible support and great people to work with. We're finding lots of support from organizations that want to send us applicants. We are also finding enough encouragement in the companies we're contacting. It's not like we have to call 100 people in a row who are slamming the phone in our ears. It would be romantic for me to say it was like that, but it's not. I am plagued constantly by my fear that I'm not up to the job and I'm blowing an amazing opportunity, but that kind of insecurity drives me to work harder. I have a chip on my shoulder. I have a lot to prove to a lot of people who may have written me off. But mostly I have an obligation to people with criminal records. And since I love what I'm doing. I'm not going through that kind of agony.

What is your process after you sign up a new company?

Our director of operations gets on the phone with that initial decision maker and finds out how they work. Large companies typically have an applicant tracking system, or an ATS. They have their own technology that we have to integrate with in order to send them applicants. So that'll be one piece of the discussion. Our CTO is involved with it too.Then we need to discover the specifics of the different positions. Where it is, how many people they want to hire, what's the compensation, what company benefits are provided. We want to find out any information they would like us to get in our interviews with the candidates. What comprises a good fit, what kind of corporate culture things are they looking for, what physical skills are required. We get a feel for the company because we want them to be successful so we can get paid. Internally, we begin planning a campaign where we figure out where the different jobs are located and who in our system we can reach out to. First, we get the company's jobs on our site. Then we’ll begin a series of targeted emails that are geographically centric. That typically bears a little bit of fruit. I wish I could say that all we have to do is email the jobs, the applicants go online to apply and that's the end of it. That would be a great business but it doesn’t work that way. Then we'll go after the same people and try to get to them through texting. That won't work particularly well either, but we still go through the motions of it. We know that inevitably we're going to have to make a lot of phone calls. We're doing it very manually now with a few people, but we're quickly reaching a point where we will have to automate a lot of these processes, which means auto dialers and press one campaigns and all this technology that we'll have to employ. That will take some money and time to integrate. But those problems that I look forward to addressing.

How does your own prison experience factor into the business?

It's a central part of my pitch, and it wasn't always that way. I used to live trying to hide it, but of course these days, you can't hide anything about your past. In fact, I now lead with it. At Y Combinator I got up there and I said, "70 million people have criminal records, they all have pain getting a job. I should know, I'm one of them." What I've discovered in business as well as on a personal level is that people are incredibly understanding and supportive when you come directly at them and you're honest and sincere, which I am and I certainly try to be. I don't try to cover up what I did. It was wrong, I apologize for it, and I'm trying to just make right on it.Far from it being a detriment to our business, I think it's a real asset. And it also goes to kind of domain credibility and expertise. There's a few of us on our staff who have been incarcerated, and we know what people go through because we went through it. We know about that mentality and that psychology, and how to best serve that clientele and talk about it authentically. We're not just theoretical about it. The people we talk to respond, they really do. You have no idea how good it does my heart when I realize that so many people actually themselves have a heart, even at big companies. So it's kind of a feel-good story in a very weird kind of way. I get that the irony doesn't end in my life. For example, I was involved in a startup before and I would talk to a VC, and of course, I would tell them about my background. The minute that happened the appointment was over. Literally over. They would say, "I'm sorry we can't talk anymore." And that would be it. Now I talk to a VC and I say, "This is my business and this is me," and then they go, "Good." They smile and they nod and they feel like that's the way it should be. So there's just a lot of weird stuff that we live with.

1	A large recruitment platform (Indeed.com, Zip Recruiter) or staffing/recruiting company may enter this space and squeeze our margins.
2	The Company may never receive a future equity financing or elect to convert the Securities upon such future financing. In addition, the Company may never undergo a liquidity event such as a sale of the Company or an IPO. If neither the conversion of the Securities nor a liquidity event occurs, the Purchasers could be left holding the Securities in perpetuity. The Securities have numerous transfer restrictions and will likely be highly illiquid, with no secondary market on which to sell them. The Securities are not equity interests, have no ownership rights, have no rights to the Company’s assets or profits and have no voting rights or ability to direct the Company or its actions.
3	The involvement of the Company’s Chief Executive Officer, who has previously been charged and pled guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges, could heighten the risk that the activities of the Company would be subject to regulatory scrutiny and any such investigation could materially adversely affect the Company. Richard Bronson, who is a “key person” of the company and is the Chief Executive Officer of the Company, was charged with securities fraud and conspiracy charges in January 2002 and pled guilty in October 2003. As a result of his conviction, the SEC imposed a lifetime ban his ability to engage in registered broker-dealer activities. The involvement of Richard Bronson in the business of the Company might become known to securities regulators and his role in the Company could heighten the risk that the activities of the Company would be subject to regulatory scrutiny and any such investigation could materially adversely affect the Company.
4	The business is yet to be profitable, and relies upon the availability of investment capital to maintain operations. If for any reason outside investors chose not to invest, then there'd be an existential danger to the business.
5	The regulatory environment surrounding the hiring of the formerly incarcerated is changing quickly from state to state and on the municipal level. Unforeseen regulations could negatively impact our ability to do business.
6	Negative press attention--such as one of our applicants acting violently on the job--could undermine our ability to convince employers that our applicants were desirable hires.
7	Since we target large, national employers as clients, we are dependent on their ability to honor their obligations to pay us. If a large client were unwilling or unable to pay us, this could have a negative impact on our business.
8	Our future success depends on the efforts of key personnel and consultants, especially our founder, Richard Bronson. The loss of services of Mr Bronson or any key personnel may have an adverse effect on us. There can be no assurance that we will be successful in attracting and retaining other personnel we require to successfully grow our business.
9	We rely on our ability to attract adequate numbers of both job seekers and to provide job listings. If either of these are unsuccessful, then this could be detrimental to our success.

Date	Amount	Security
03/2019	$255,000	Convertible Note
11/2018	$93,536	SAFE
08/2016	$44,484	Loan
10/2017	$650,000	SAFE

Name	Richard Bronson
Amount Invested	$44,484
Transaction type	Loan
Issued	08/10/2016
Outstanding principal plus interest	$44,484 as of 04/2018
Interest	0.0 per annum
Outstanding	Yes
Current with payments	Yes
Relationship	CEO, Founder
Richard Bronson, CEO and founder leant the company $44,484 when it was first created, and is due to be paid back at some point in the future when the funds are available. It is an interest free, term free loan.

Name	Richard Bronson
Amount Invested	$20,000
Transaction type	Safe
Issued	06/06/2017
Discount rate	0.0
Valuation cap	$6,000,000
Relationship	CEO and Founder
This was money invested in the Y Combinator SAFE fundraising round for 70million Jobs.

$50,000	95% Build out sales and development team 5% Wefunder Intermediary fee
$107,000	35% Build out sales and development team; 20% add marketing capacity; 20% increase national presence at job fairs; 20% hasten our national scaling. We would like to have a presence in all 50 states and quadruple the number of organizations we with with. 5% Wefunder Intermediary fee

1	Y Combinator 2017 alum. Other alumni include Dropbox, Stripe, and Airbnb.
2	Partnership with the City of Los Angeles.
3	SXSW Pitch Competition Finalist in 2018.

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