Ryan Rutan: Welcome back to another episode of the Startup therapy podcast. This is Ryan Rotan joined as always by my friend and the founder and CEO of startups dot com. Will Schroeder. Well, we talk a lot about the founder journey. We talk a lot about the evolution of, you know, a person becoming a founder, but we typically talk about this in the context of, you know, adults being founders, right? Like maybe leaving a career job or they've left university and now they want to start something on their own or whatever it is. But there's also this notion that kids can be founders too. Kids can be entrepreneurs too and there's a really interesting discussion to be had around that and that you happen to be doing something pretty interesting in that space right now. So what do you see at the ground level? Man?

Wil Schroter: We decided at our kids' school as a school, not me, not me that we wanted to see what it would be like if you could teach entrepreneurship from K kindergarten through 12th grade. In my proposal to the school, it's a fairly small private school, about 700 kids in a very progressive school. And I say that because we just have more latitude on what we can do. You know, if we get behind something, we just kind of run with it. And the premise was this and this is a work in progress. But it's fascinating to watch. The premise was what if we could teach entrepreneurship with the same gravity that we teach, math, science, reading, et cetera. Now, some of those are fundamental skills. But what if entrepreneurship was something that every kid was learning the entire way through? It wasn't just a one off, like, like they're taking like a, a French class or a Spanish class. It was the DNA of the school and we presented it to the folks administration, the board, et cetera and they loved it and they said, go for it. And so a couple of years ago, we started at the high school level, started teaching it and, and I don't think that really opened my eyes up quite yet because high schoolers kind of feel closer to college students and they've got a level of maturity. But in the past year, this year, I started teaching it at the middle school level, which for this school is, is grades five through eight. And that blew my mind because it started to like test this thesis that what if we could catch kids and teach them kind of to go their own direction to have agency at a time when their minds are wide open. You see it with your kids. Right. With Hannah, she's, she's 10.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, it's incredible. I, I, you know, you and I had this discussion recently around the fact that I now feel like at 10 I'm dealing with a relatively complete processor. Right. She doesn't have all the Softwares running yet. Right. She's missing knowledge. She's missing experience. She's missing other things, but the capability to take in that information, comprehend it. I'm finding very little at this point that she can't. And it's such an interesting point in time right now because she has that full processor capability. But she hasn't been on the planet long enough to have had her creativity constrained to have been put in the box enough times that we automatically start to shut down creative thinking because we know it doesn't fit with the trope with the mold with whatever. And so I think that's the experience you're having right now. Is that coming down from that high school level where, you know, sadly those kids have already been in a system long enough that some of those rails will dictate how far off the known path they're thinking can diverge. Right. And at 10 again, I feel like we've got a complete processor there. Contrast that to my, my four year old Jack, he doesn't have a complete process. Right. He's, he's full of creativity and bad ideas, but he doesn't have all of the capabilities of of internalizing and using some of the information. Whereas I feel like at 10, she's got that right. But those high schoolers are in a different place. Now, we've got this combination of full processor, full creativity and man, if ever there was an environment where entrepreneurial things could happen, feels like that's, that's the crucible,

Wil Schroter: right? And at a time where you don't want to mess that up. In other words, you have this very small window in the grand scheme of life to plant these seeds and to teach these skills. But really to say what if you could just let your mind go at an age when you're used to letting your mind go. When I run the same exercise with both the upper school, the high school and the middle school. Here's what we do the 1st, 2nd week. I say that all of you already have an idea for a business and they don't believe me. And I say it's already in your head. You just don't know it yet. And I said all ideas, all good ideas come from problems that you have problems that you see in the world that you're trying to fix. So list every problem that you have and the kids go nuts. Right. They, oh my God, I have this problem and their problems are when I say hilarious. I don't mean that, like, in a condescending way, they're actually just kind of hilarious. Like they're like, sometimes I'm in bed and I'm hungry and I want my food to come to me. And I'm like, man, man, are we a different

Ryan Rutan: tribu that launches pop tarts at my face? Yeah,

Wil Schroter: exactly. And so what's incredible about it is they don't stop to think. Well, maybe I should just get up. They're like, no, a drone should come to me that I command by Alexa and it should drop my food off. Right.

Ryan Rutan: RBA deliver eggs. That's

Wil Schroter: exactly what they said. A robot delivers your food. But here's what's great about it. They're seeing things at that stage as what should happen. In other words, here's my problem. How should it be fixed? They're not constrained, as you said, by reality, that's actually how great problems and great products get invented. Now, take that for a second. That's their inventiveness. That's, that's one vector of all this another is they don't know that they can't do these things because they haven't been told yet.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, this is where knowledge is both a benefit and a bit of a trap. Right. She doesn't have all the software yet. Software is great and it's soft but it still does. The thing that's specifically been told to do. Right. It runs the program when you don't have that software yet. You're still in that position where I don't know that I can't do that because it would be cost prohibitive because I don't know how money works yet. I'm 10. I know money comes from my dad's pocket. Right. Like that's, that's how it works. Right. That's all I know about it. And she knows a bit more about it than that. But you know, those constraints just don't exist yet. They're not aware of them and therefore it doesn't immediately limit the thinking in the same way it would for an adult. All of a sudden all of those barriers just pop up the minute that thought jumps into our head, the barriers appear right along with it. And then as a, as an adult, we have to then logically process our way around those. If we're gonna continue with the thought at all. And in most cases, we just don't, we just shut it down. I'll

Wil Schroter: give you an example of another idea. This one student said, hey, I've got a pair of shoes that I've got right now. They're amazing. I love them. But I know in six months I'm going to out grow them. Why can't the shoe grow with me? And I thought about that, I'm like, it's such a good problem. Now, I can come back as an adult and I could say, well, shoes won't have that elasticity or I can say, well, if you're a shoe manufacturer, you want people to be needing new shoes and all of these things, none of that matters. All that matters is that problem is supposed to be solved. It is not solved by saying you can't buy more shoes, right? Or, or I'm sorry, you have to buy more shoes and that we have this one moment where to your point about, about Hannah, her processor is strong enough so she can now run these exercises. Software is not written yet. And what if at that moment we parachute in and this isn't just about being parents or anything else like this is, this is society, right? Every founder that's listening to this should be thinking about it. Not as, oh, you know, I don't have kids or something like that. They should be thinking about it as how do we reset this thing? Because this is a whole sea change for education. And we should not lose that moment, the moment he is smart enough to have that idea, but it doesn't have the software to tell me you can't do it yet. That's when we jump in. Do you remember when we were kids? I mean, your mileage may vary but this is pretty much, yeah, growing up our schooling tended to look something like this. You get through high school. You, hopefully if you can do it, uh, plan for college and your guidance counselor gives you one of about a dozen careers. Right. This is how it used to work and it still works. I, I shouldn't say it still works like this. Here's a dozen careers and here's how it goes, Ryan. You're good at math. You're an accountant now, number one you're 17 years old. What do you know about being an account? Like, why would you want to be an accountant? Not knocking accountant? Somehow they always come up on the show, throw him under the bus. But how did that happen? I'm good at math. And now I'm an accountant. What

Ryan Rutan: I think I've told this story before, but when I took the, when I took that test and I think ours came back with 24 options. Mine were lawyer and Forest Ranger. Those were the two options, right? So I said, ah, I should have gone into environmental law, but I didn't know that was a thing at the time and neither did my guidance counselor. So I did not thank God

Wil Schroter: if you were to take people and say, what do you want to do? Where do your interests lie? Not just what are you good at? See, that's, that's a big, big difference. And that's what's really interesting about entrepreneurship is it doesn't require you to be good at one thing. You kind of have to be sort of good at everything or kind of fumble your way through it. But we all get to start in the same place, which we have an idea. We're now all of a sudden, I guess running a company and we all have to figure it out. We're not competing, we're competing with maybe other competitors, but we're not competing with 1000 other people who just went through the exact same education, through the exact same timeline, looking for the exact same

Ryan Rutan: job. And then all getting asked exactly the same question, which is what you want to be when you grow up, when you've had no chance to actually explore that. And I think that's that, that this is a really interesting point here. So let's, let's hang for a second when we're run through this system that's designed to point us towards one of these things and this becomes our option. It also didn't give us any opportunity to explore any of those things. We just show up one day and we're like, ok, now pick your path going forward and you're like, do I get a minute to like, know anything about them? No, not really. Right. And so I think that's where this the, the idea of being a founder as a student as a youth, right? Doesn't have to be a student just as a young person, less about like starting the business, more about the mental exercise of exploring and trying to understand what if this interests me? Why is this a problem? Why do I want to solve it? Why do I care? Who else cares? This gives you something so different and will completely change the course and, and this is the other point. I wanna, I wanna stick on for a second. We know there's plenty of research around why creativity dies, right? And that's just because we get put on these linear paths and, and we're, we're taught not to be creative because it doesn't benefit you in that system. Right. Try getting creative on a math test doesn't go very well. Right. Not a whole lot of room for creativity, creativity and biology, right? Nope, that's not where the heart is. It's always in the same spot. Right. And so I would love to see research conducted or maybe it already exists and I just haven't found it yet that talks about what happens when we allow. And we encourage this type of exploration at this age whereby we maybe we don't block some of those pathways, maybe we maintain a different level of creativity for life because we've had these experiences earlier on that showed being creative, not considering the prescribed path and just instead exploring what interests us, what we're curious about a problem we want to solve and how that may forever impact how we think and, and how we behave as, as creative individuals and as grownups should we ever achieve grown up? Uh I'm still not sure I'm there yet.

Wil Schroter: You and me both. I mean, if we look at it like this, if we were to say that the first goal is for you to find out what you love, you know, where your passions lie, et cetera now to be fair, your passions at 10 years old versus 20 years old versus 30 years old. And, and, and probably will change. Your worldview is still very small, likely to

Ryan Rutan: change. Right. It's a lack of exposure at that point.

Wil Schroter: Exactly. But the idea is you're probably going to have by that age, some early stages of some Proclivities of things that you generally love. If we could say, look, here's what's going to happen. We're gonna give you some tools so that what you can work on in life, which by the way may not be your full time job, what you can work on in life will be tied to your passions. Now, here's where it breaks, or here's where people think it breaks. I should say I had a student in one of my last classes who was a world class golfer. I think he's like number five on the junior PGA tour right now. He's unbelievable. Right? So he said, I love golf clearly,

Ryan Rutan: you don't say

Wil Schroter: you don't say. And I said, ok, but he said I may or may not make the PGA, et cetera, et cetera. And in this case, he might, but I'm, I'm using this even as this example. And I said to him, you know, there's 100 different ways that you can spend the rest of your life in the world of golf that don't involve being a golfer. You can run an online community for golfers, you can sell golf equipment, you can invent a golf club. I mean, there's a million things that you can do to make golf the centerpiece of your life. But we're not taught that we're taught. No, you're an accountant now. That's your

Ryan Rutan: thing. You were good at math. You're an accountant. You're good at golf. You're a golfer, right?

Wil Schroter: Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I think there's this really interesting opportunity to say. Here's your North Star. You wanna be in this world? You love video games. Ok. There's 100 different ways for you to be in video games. It doesn't mean you're just going to be a professional youtuber and people watch you play video games, right? Like that's not the only way to do it. You could be developing video games. There's a million things I think that when we say here is your North Star, we, we kind of start there and say you're North Star as you wanna be this. And we say now your job, it could be an exercise as part of this class or part of the overall education is to come up with as many different ways that you can do that as possible. So you understand the full spectrum of where you can plot your life. And I think when you do that and you force people to recognize that there's 100 different ways that you can take this path. It has a very different outcome. Zero people ever said that to me, I'm 100% sure of that. You know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done 1000 times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it, but that's ok. That's kind of what we're here to do. Do we talk about this stuff on the show? But we actually solve these problems all day long at groups dot startups dot com. So, if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, it's, it's super important because it takes the binary element out of it. It takes the binary. I either became the golfer or I didn't. I either became the NBA basketball star. I didn't, I either became the Call of Duty champion or I didn't. But the way it works now is we aim for that thing. We aim for the moon and if we don't hit it, then it's this kind of pachinko style thing where we just fall down, bouncing off random pins until we land somewhere. But unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases that I can cite you don't actually land in one of those 100 other things in that industry, right? You just assume that it's like I wanted this thing or this is my passion, couldn't do whatever the pinnacle of that is. And so then I, then I went and became an accountant Right. I'm not a golfer. I'm now an accountant who plays golf on the weekends. So I think that it's so critical that we do help set that North Star. But that, then we point out that there's an entire damn galaxy around that same North Star that are still amazing outcomes that may not have been that particular star. Right. And I think this is where we're really failing kids and, and just, I mean, people in general just don't understand that we have so much optionality without leaving that realm of interest, curiosity and passion. Simply because the one thing that we were focused on and told that we were good at or told that we needed to pursue, didn't pan out. And so then we just literally fall back on something else. But I feel like it's, it's quite random what people end up falling back on.

Wil Schroter: I totally agree. Here's why I think it's our job societally to open Pandora's box of entrepreneurship because here's what happens. And I'll give you a real world example. It just happened. Week one, we tell the, the students in the class again, middle school class, 10 to 12 year olds, we say come up with a problem, they come up with a problem. Then we do this little Houdini act where we say, guess what? That's a product. What? Yeah, exactly. Right. They can't believe it. And they run home and tell their parents that I invented something today. Their parents can't believe it. I invented it and it was so effortless for them to do it. That's the most amazing part. But hold on to that for a second. This is all part of the Pandora's Box. The next thing we do is we put them in, in teams and we have the teams kind of wrestle with each other to figure out which idea they wanna work on. So it helps ideas get a little bit of merit to them. It helps them beat them up a little bit. But now they see what happens when other people work on their idea as well. And they take it this way and they add this feature and they, they take it this way and they realize that their ideas are also just a seed that many, many other people can grow and grow and grow. At the end of the class. Yesterday, we just happened to be at this milestone. Yesterday, I told the class I said as of today, you've taken a problem, you've created a solution, you formed a team, you've come with the name for your product, guess what? You're all co-founders. And they, they stopped for a second and they were like, what do you mean? Now? I was like, you are all now co-founders of startup companies and said go update your linkedin resume. By the way, you still don't know what linkedin is, right? And I was like at 10 years old. You're now a co-founder and you understand what it takes to take your own idea, turn it into a company and to kind of go that direction. Here's what I'm talking about. I cannot put that genie back in the bottle for the rest of their lives. They will know what those steps are to kind of go that direction. They'll feel that pride of ownership, which you see beaming out of every kid that never thought they'd have any opportunity like this. And there's absolutely no reason you can't teach this across the board worldwide.

Ryan Rutan: Exactly. It's not hard. And it gives them that dopamine moment tied to a creative process that is otherwise going to be designed out of their system. Right? And I think this is, it's so, so important that, that they have that moment because that may be it, it may, it may take no more than that for creativity to maintain its foothold in their lives, right? Which has insane impacts on everything else that happens thereafter otherwise, and we talked about this before the vast majority of people just end up following a path that's sort of sequentially presented to them without them having a whole lot of say in it. Right. And it's so sad. Right. We have one shot at this. Right. And I'm not sure if you know, if I can, I can quote him as having said this, I'm not sure if this is his quote or not, but our partner Elliott said to me once and it, it stuck with me through, there are no dress rehearsals in life, right? And I loved that. It was so spot on and it speaks to this point of like, look, we, we get one shot at all of this. And if we're just allowing ourselves to kind of bob along on the Lazy river, the chances of it turning out amazingly are, are so much less than if we put a little bit of deliberation into this. But without removing the creative piece, right? Because you can deliberately aim towards a target that's been defined for you and you can achieve it. And I would argue that the people that I've seen do that end up with no real sense of accomplishment. At the end, they realize they followed a path that somebody else set out for them. They achieved the goal that somebody else set out for them. And at the end, that achievement feels relatively meaningless, right? And, and of course, mileage will vary and you know, you may be very happy in your career job and the money that you make and, and the retirement that you take and all of that. And yet I would pause it. My theory would be that if you were to have defined every step of that path for yourself along the way, you would have been a far more engaged, happy and accomplished human,

Wil Schroter: but play that out again, you don't have to teach this twice the moment you plant that seed and some will run with it. Some won't. That's ok. This isn't to say everyone has to be a founder long term or they even have to found a company. But what?

Ryan Rutan: We'd be screwed if that happened. We do need some, we do need some staff.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. Right. Right. And some people just, that's what they wanna do. They wanna be staff and that's perfectly fine too. The point is everybody should have the, the shot at it. Everyone should be asked the question how they respond to it is a whole different discussion, but everyone should, should have that opportunity. When I pitched this concept, this entrepreneurial concept to the school. I said, I, I, I wanna instill two key things, agency and ownership, agency being here are the tools that I know to ask the question. What do I care about not to what other people care about for me? And do I understand that I have that optionality. Most people do not. I didn't coming out of school. Everybody in my family was some version of a trade, a carpenter, a landscaper, et cetera. And I just assumed because that's what they did. That's what I do. And that's what I planned on

Ryan Rutan: doing. Their path had been defined for them. Therefore, your path was defined for you. This is what we do. We follow a set of steps that lead to a very specific outcome, a specific job and you know, a specific

Wil Schroter: life, nobody ever asked me who do you want to be not? What do you want to be? Who do you want to be? And I wouldn't have been able to answer the question because I had zero seconds to think about it because nobody ever put me on that path. That's

Ryan Rutan: because you didn't know who Tom Brady was yet.

Wil Schroter: The second part was ownership. When people present their own ideas, when people run their own businesses, everyone listening to this podcast, they treat their trade, their craft, their life, their work so much differently, so much differently. There's a level of pride when these kids are presenting their ideas. It's one of the first times where they realize that the outcome or the feedback is very personal to them. They're not just reciting a binary equation in math and they're either right or wrong. They feel attached to it. They give a shit about

Ryan Rutan: it. There's subjective feedback around something they're doing for the first time.

Wil Schroter: Yeah. And so I'm gonna do the, imagine all the people kind of thing, but imagine, right? We have a whole generation of folks coming into the world that really give a shit about what they do, like, really care about what they do. And I think that's interesting because even in some jobs that people don't necessarily like, you know, or would say, oh, that's not a great job. It changes everything. If you started it. If you made it happen, Wayne hea started waste management, literally cleaned up trash. You know, he's one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history, but it was his waste management. It was his business picking up that trash different entirely.

Ryan Rutan: Yeah. Yeah. If you're just, uh, rolling the cans to the curb probably have a very different feeling about that business.

Wil Schroter: You do because you, you own it and you care about the outcome, you care about the service, et cetera. Whereas as we're producing a world of, you know, next generation of drones of drones of drones, I don't want to call people drones. I just, and they're preprogrammed, you know, on a path. That's a totally different world with a totally different outcome. If we take away my agency, when you take away my ownership, it's just not the same product and you see it time and everywhere you go in every business that you interact with. So I think that it's possible that we can give kids these tools. Right? I do think it is possible.

Ryan Rutan: I think you're proving it in real time. Hey, I think we're, we're seeing it play out and we're seeing things like, you know, I mean, you and I have both been entrepreneurial since we were, we were quite young, you know, you were running a bulletin board service, selling possibly Pirated software. I don't know, maybe not totally

Wil Schroter: Pirated software.

Ryan Rutan: I think the statute of limitations is gone on that when you're safe, you know, I was running around a neighborhood where there was a lot of construction going on with a lemonade wagon, right? And you just, you, you learn that you can do these things and it just not necessarily that it set me on an entrepreneurial path because there were points in time where despite having had multiple early entrepreneurial ventures, you know, and quite varied, some tech, some non tech. By the time I got to university, I had decided that what I probably wanted to do was get back on a more defined path for some reason. Right? Incidentally, a chance encounter in a hallway led me to start a business again, which then put me back on the entrepreneurial path. Otherwise I probably would have ended up quite literally a doctor or lawyer.

Wil Schroter: But what if it wasn't so chancey?

Ryan Rutan: Yeah, exactly. What if that had been? What if instead I had been told like, hey, keep exploring, keep looking, keep finding what if it's all you knew? Right. Luckily, for me, I had had enough of those experiences early on that. I believed that you could do something like that, right? That when I was asked a question in a hallway at university that my first thought was, yeah, I could do that. I could actually, I could make money that I could turn that into a business. I I want to solve that problem. Right? If I hadn't had those earlier experiences and I hadn't been exposed to that. And again, that exposure was purely by chance. I don't think the same thing would have happened. I would have had a very different response to that question and that would have forever changed my path in life. Not to say that it'd be any better or worse off. I have no idea. But I've really enjoyed what I've done up until this point. And I'm really happy that I get to keep doing what I'm doing. And so wouldn't want to make that change even if I could at this point. And so, yeah, I think that it's an amazing opportunity that we have at this point to be able to share these skills. This not even the skills as much as just the pure perspective,

Wil Schroter: perspective. That's a great

Ryan Rutan: way to put it that it's possible, right, that the software that ends up existing in your little process or from this point forward is of your choosing, should you choose to define it? Absolutely. I love that right. That it doesn't have to be handed to you that it's in your hands. But I think it's incumbent on us as the adults to foster that thought in the first place. Because quite obviously, when it's left up to random chance, far less people are actually going to become founders, develop that mentality, maintain that curiosity, maintain that creativity over a long period of time, we just don't see it as

Wil Schroter: adults. I agree. And I tell you what, I don't think it's quite the herculean effort that people think it is when you're talking about changing the STEM program, you know, within all schools. That is a herculean effort. Right. You're changing textbooks, et cetera. What's really interesting about this is all you're really doing is unlocking, you know, an innate curiosity or you're taking away a massive barrier that was about to get put up. Once you explain how this works, you can't unexplained it again. Pandora's box is open at that point and everything floods out. Now, some students will choose to use it, but no one will forget it. That's the big thing. Once you understand agency and ownership for the first time, you may look at that and say, ah, that's fine. I really want to get this accounting thing. I don't know why we keep picking on an accountants. But if that's the way you go, I'm our CFO. It's worked. Ok for me,

Ryan Rutan: it's just a thing we do. Let's, that's the thing we do. Let's just let, let, let, just own it for now. There are pin cushions, sorry guys.

Wil Schroter: But it's our job. It's incumbent on us as a generation of founders. If we do nothing else, talking about leaving this world a little bit different is to plant that seed in the next generation. So that once we've done that, we can't undo that we can't undo that for life, they will grow up and they will plant that seed in the next generation, the next generation thereafter. It's our job and this is a critical moment in time to actually make that change happen. Every single person listening right now to this podcast has the ability to do it. We're all founders, we can all sit in any, it's our kids. It's a room full of kids, et cetera and plant that seed. The point is the time to do it is right now. So in addition to all the stuff related to founder groups, you've also got full access to everything on startups dot com. That includes all of our education tracks, which will be funding customer acquisition, even how to manage your monthly finances. They're so much stuff in there. All of our software including Biz plan for putting together detailed business plans and financials launch rock for attracting early customers and of course, fund for attracting investment capital. When you log into the startups dot com site, you'll find all of these resources available.