How 2 Female Entrepreneurs Are Connecting Veterans With New Careers

By Eric Hal Schwartz

Finding the right job is often as much about who you know as what you know, a phenomenon with which plenty of people in D.C. are familiar. But military veterans mustering out often lack the kind of network that can help them transition to a new career. Serial entrepreneurs Leah Wald and Diana Tsai plan to fix that problem with their new startup, Veterati, which is raising a $650,000 convertible note round.
Veterati is the answer to a question raised in Tsai’s mind late last year.
“I was running a company in Shanghai at the time. I was reading Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, about Vietnam veterans and how hard things were for them when they came home,” Tsai said. “I wondered it it was still as bad today.”
Tsai spoke with friends of hers who were veterans and found surveys showing that almost 70 percent of veterans said that finding a new job was their biggest challenge. Veterans were often told to look at job boards and classified ads, but that just wasn’t useful. Tsai realized that here was a problem she could help solve, but she couldn’t do it alone. Tsai reached out to Wald, a close friend as well as a fellow entrepreneur, who enthusiastically jumped into brainstorming ways to help veterans find post-military careers.
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