Anastasia Crew, co-founder of Founders Embassy, talks about building a community for international and immigrant entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. She came from Russia, got her MBA in San Francisco, and met her co-founder at the C100 accelerator in Canada before starting the organization to support founders like herself.
I'd like to introduce our next guest speaker, Anastasia Kru. In the last 2 years, she has been the co-founder of Founders Embassy, the event committee chair for Taste of the Nation, and she has held various high-impact events for international startups and nonprofits. In her spare time, she's also a rock star.
Woo!
Anastasia is a true believer, a true believer in the radical inclusiveness, and her mission is to help international and immigrant entrepreneurs to get established in Silicon Valley. Let's give a round of applause to Anastasia.
Thank you.
Anastasia, thank you so much for being with us today. We're super excited to have you. Let's start out, tell us a little bit about you, what you're building, and what you're doing here in Silicon Valley.
Well, thanks for having me, guys. Before I answer that, I kind of want to understand the room a little bit better. So I'm going to ask you a couple questions, like a little poll. So I want to understand how many of you came from a different country, outside of the US? OK. How many of you are a first-time entrepreneur, or maybe just have an idea of starting a company? OK. That helps me to understand a little bit better the audience, and so we can tailor our discussion that it's relevant to you guys and helpful. But to answer your question, Courtney, I have probably a very similar background to 90% of the people here. I am an immigrant myself. I came from Russia. I was born and raised there. Pretty much lived more than half of my life in Russia. I've been living in the US for about 10 years now. I came first time here as an exchange student. I don't know if this program still exists, but there used to be a program called Work and Travel, where you as a student can come to the US, work usually in hospitality area for 3 months, and then travel for 1 month to kind of polish your English skills. So the first place, I'm probably 100% sure that none of you ever been to that state. I was in Montana State, so it was the very first place that I came to the US, and I was like, uh, it doesn't look like what I've seen on TV. It's not New York, it's not LA, it's not like San Francisco. It's a very small town, 2,000 people, one main street, kind of like, you know, the horror movies that you see, like one street, very dark, not a lot of people. That was my first impression of the US, and I was like, oh my God, I have I spent 3 months here. That's crazy. But the people were so nice, and I used to be working as a bartender at the bar. That's how I was polishing my English. But then I still had to go back home to finish my college degree, but I fell in love with the US, with the culture, with the, you know, people here. So I knew that I wanted to come back. And when was the time for me to go to grad school? I decided that I want to do it in the US. So I applied for my MBA here in San Francisco. I only applied to one school. It was San Francisco State University. And the only reason why I did it for just one school is because it was the only school that was kind of based in the city. So I was like, I don't want to travel anywhere. I want to be in the city. So I applied, got accepted, moved here, did my MBA. And then there was a lot of restriction being an international student. You can't work full-time. You have certain quota that you have of hours that you have to work. It was like 20 hours a week, which is nothing. So you can't really find a real job until you graduate. So I've done a lot of internship, and one of the companies that I ended up getting a job offer after school was a public company. Public company, public education company, and I got a job offer as an event coordinator for office of a CEO. So pretty much whole my career before Founders Embassy, I was in the event business. So I was organizing conferences for corporates and working with my CEO, traveling to different conferences. So I got to work with a lot of startups, corporates, nonprofits, But the event business is very limiting, and it's a lot of rinse and repeat. So I was starting to kind of like getting bored and losing myself. So I wanted to do something bigger that has more impact. And I started looking around, where would I go next? And it was still in event business, but it was working for a nonprofit, an accelerator, but still a nonprofit that's called C100. It was a Canadian accelerator that was based here in San Francisco. And that's where exactly the Founders Embassy idea was born. So, and that's where I met my co-founder as well. So I was doing programs and events for them, and my co-founder was running community and marketing. But we saw a lot of limitation, like focusing on just one country wasn't enough for us, especially seeing how important the work that we do and how we can help startups to achieve their goals. And we wanted something big and bigger than what we had, and that's how Founders Embassy was born.
