Andrew Yang, the test-prep chief who ran for president on $1,000 a month
Andrew Yang lasted five months as a corporate lawyer before quitting a job he likened to a pie-eating contest where the prize was more pie. A decade later he was a millionaire from GMAT tutoring, and by 2019 he was pitching every American adult a monthly check from the government.
Yang was born on January 13, 1975, in Schenectady, New York, to parents who had come from Taiwan in the 1960s and met as graduate students at Berkeley. His father, a physicist, worked in IBM and General Electric labs and earned over 50 patents. Andrew grew up in Somers in Westchester County, boarded at Phillips Exeter, and debated for the 1992 US national team at the world championships in London. Brown gave him an economics and political science degree in 1996, and Columbia Law School a law degree in 1999.
After leaving Davis Polk & Wardwell, which he called the five worst months of his life, he co-founded Stargiving in February 2000, a site for celebrity-linked charity fundraising that folded when the dot-com bubble burst in 2002. Following a stint at a healthcare startup, he joined friend Zeke Vanderhoek at Manhattan Prep and became chief executive in 2006. The GMAT tutoring company grew from five locations to 69 before Kaplan bought it in December 2009.
In 2011 he started Venture for America, a fellowship that placed young graduates in startups in struggling cities. Launched with $200,000, it trained 40 fellows in 2012 and a class of 106 by 2014, earning him a Champion of Change honour from the Obama White House. Its promise of 100,000 jobs fell far short, though: an ABC News count found only 365 by 2020.
Yang filed to run for president on November 6, 2017, working at first from an apartment owned by his mother. His central idea was a $1,000 monthly universal basic income to cushion workers against automation. An appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience in February 2019 lifted his campaign, and online fans called themselves the Yang Gang. He dropped out on February 11, 2020, and in October 2021 founded the Forward Party.
Source: Andrew Yang
