Building to Last: One Founder's Case for Building Differently
Michael Sanchez (YC ’23) never set out to be a founder.
Growing up in West New York, New Jersey, he became one of the first students from Memorial High School in more than a decade to get accepted to multiple elite universities. The town gave him a proclamation for his achievement.
But the recognition left him with an uncomfortable realization.
If his acceptance felt exceptional, it wasn’t because students in his community lacked talent. It was more about the structural gaps his community faced, and he wanted to change that.
What began as Michael volunteering to advise younger students became Circle Match: a non-profit that helps students from low-income communities navigate the college admissions process through a near-peer, “pay-it-forward” advising model. Today, Circle Match serves students across 12 Title I high schools, led by many of the same students who once benefited from the program themselves.
After graduating from Yale, Michael grew into his role as its founding executive director, a path that ran through Tsai CITY’s Summer Fellowship program.
For Michael, building wasn’t about chasing startup culture. It was about discovering that innovation can take many forms and that the work of building something lasting often begins with solving a problem close to home.
"I don’t think I necessarily intended to be a founder. I saw a need in my community and tried to address it."
For people who don’t know Circle Match, where did it come from?
“I don’t think I necessarily intended to be a founder. I saw a need in my community and tried to address it.”
When he realized that classmates with academic backgrounds like his own were getting rejected from local state colleges, “it became abundantly clear there was a college access issue. One [he] was able to benefit from, but felt really guilty about.” Sanchez asked a school administrator if he could help the students a year below him.
“He said, ‘You don’t need to ask to volunteer your time.’”
One of the students he supported reached Yale; another earned a full ride to UVA.
After their college admissions “The first thing the students asked was, ‘How can I come back and help?’” Over COVID, what started as a ragtag group transformed into a 501(c)(3).
Put the first version of Circle Match next to what it is today. What’s the same, and what’s changed?
“I’d say nearly everything is the same, which is good in a lot of ways.”
The pay-it-forward model and its logic are intact: Circle Match targets highly selective universities because “our students demographically are the least likely to graduate college, as first-gen, low-income kids, and those are also the schools that can generally fund them the most.”
The long game is return: “getting students to go on, get a college degree, and come back to their hometown.”
The youth-led structure has held. High school seniors still advise the students behind them, as Sanchez once did. What’s grown is scale and maturity: a real board of directors, and an expansion from two students to 60, and from one school to 12. The per-student commitment — 80 hours — hasn’t moved.
A quick definition: what’s a Title I school?
“The majority of kids are on free and reduced-price lunch, which means they’re below the poverty line. We intentionally try to partner with Title I schools located in inner cities.”
Title I is the federal funding stream, under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, directed to schools that serve high concentrations of students from low-income families.
When did you first feel the model was actually working, not just an idea confined to your hometown?
For many founders, validation comes from customers or revenue.
For Michael, it came from something else.
“We had too much advisor interest, people wanting to pay it forward, and not enough students.”
That upends a common assumption: “There’s this big idea that the only way you can get people to do things is if someone’s dangling money at them. Our model challenges that, because our ecosystem is based on gratitude.”
Funding the model without charging families came out of a Tsai CITY exercise mapping the organization’s stakeholders. Charging the students it serves was off the table, so the team landed on school districts and universities as potential funders.
How did you first get involved with Tsai CITY, and what did its support actually look like?
It started with a nudge from his education studies advisor, Mira Debbs, and real apprehension: “I imagined it would be like The Social Network or Wolf of Wall Street. The crazy startup, go-go-go, no time for sleep. And it wasn’t that at all.”
A conversation with Tsai CITY’s Managing Director Zoe Hunter shifted that perception.
“I was really shocked at how kind she was.” The support was concrete. Tsai CITY’s $15,000, combined with an earlier $5,000 from the Edwin Gould Foundation, “allowed us to dedicate an entire summer to building the entire organization full-time with the Tsai CITY Summer Fellowship program.” It was also during that period that the Tiger College Advising Team rebranded to the more scalable Circle Match.
The cohort mattered as much as the money. “I found it really empowering to see people go through similar kinds of changes. Before that, I felt a little isolated.” And it filled practical gaps. Matt Gira, who led the fellowship, “sat us down and was like, ‘This is how you budget.’ How would I know that as a 21-year-old? I wouldn’t.”
As Michael puts it:
“A big part of being a student founder is that you don’t know what you don’t know.”
What’s a lesson you only learned by doing—something a class or mentor couldn’t teach you in advance?
“Before you create a solution to a problem, you have to actually understand the problem.”
College access, he’s come to see, is often a surface symptom. “If there’s a college access issue in a community, there’s usually something a lot deeper going on.”The team keeps working to “pivot our solutions so we’re able to address underlying causes.” He’s candid that Yale left some gaps, “a liberal arts education is one that frames your thinking in all facets of life, but coursework doesn’t always arm students with the ability to conduct more practical tasks, like budgeting or writing contracts.” He credits Tsai CITY for filling that practical knowledge gap.
For a student sitting where you sat, an idea they care about, no clear path, what would you tell them?
“If you have an idea, go for it. Not everything needs to be so regimented … maybe you do it once and realize you don’t want to do it again. But you learn so many skills, you develop a great story.”
He laughs at how unexpected his own path has been.
“I graduated with an English major,” and he’s now the organization’s payroll administrator.
His honest caveat is the discomfort of starting, what he calls “climbing cringe mountain.”
For a long time, Michael resisted calling himself a founder because of the baggage he associated with the word.
Until a wider definition freed him: “Founders don’t come in specific shapes and colors. What a founder is, is someone who has an idea and sticks with it.”
It’s for this reason that he values that Tsai CITY frames itself around innovation: “Some people don’t like the word entrepreneurship. I like ‘innovation more.”
What is Circle Match most focused on getting right now?
Sustainability — which, he clarifies, means cash flow.
“You can’t be burning more money than you’re bringing in.”
With three full-time staff, the team is weighing whether a fourth is responsible yet. “We don’t want to build too fast. Running a company feels like building a tower: you don’t want the foundation to get wobbly because you rushed.”
That means diversifying revenue against political and funding shifts while staying mission-driven, and acting as a genuine partner to schools. “We’re not vendors, we’re partners.”
On what innovation can look like
One of Michael’s biggest mindset shifts came from realizing innovation doesn’t have to result in something you can hold.
“A product doesn’t need to be in a box. A product can be a program.”
At Tsai CITY, conversations often pushed him to define Circle Match’s product.
The answer wasn’t always obvious.
“How do we talk about this ecosystem we’ve built? It’s not a product. Circle Match is a community of people helping each other.” Mentorship scales differently, he argues, “it’s scalable, but not scalable with a capital S.”
And that is his case to any student who assumes innovation isn’t for them:
Innovation isn’t always a tangible product or tool; it can also be a process sparked by human connection.