Startups -- So Easy a 12-year-old Can Do It | Hacker News Reader

Startups -- So Easy a 12-year-old Can Do It

steveblank.com

38 pointsterrisv5 comments

Even better - 4th graders in my school ran the cookie business as part of the curriculum. Each week, one student was the "manager" who would supervise the baking of cookies in one corner of the classroom.

Initially, shares were offered to the class for $5 each, 2 per student maximum. I thought it was a dumb idea so I didn't ask my parents for the $10. That capital was used to purchase the ingredients (by that manager's mom, reimbursed), and the manager and his/her deputy would supervise the baking of the cookies each morning and would sell them at lunchtime for 15 cents each.

The assets of the company were liquidated at the end of the year and each $5 share was worth $70. I've been overoptimistic about entrepreneurship ever since, probably to compensate for missing out on having $140 of fuck-you-money in 4th grade.

Great story. We've been trying hard to get our daughter's Girl Scout troop to do anything like this without success. That's exactly what Girl Scouts should be doing.

We might try again with the kids from our First Lego League team after the season.

Or what we should really do is start an incubator (or a "virtual" incubator online) aimed at teens.

Well, there's already "Business-Wise" and "Cookie-Biz". You might do better trying to help girls attain one of those badges using startup thinking than to try and get the entire troupe doing a startup.

(There might be some overlap possibilities in the "Global Action" and "Get with the Land" programs too)

Make it so much fun that the first group tells all their friends to try.

This is a good idea being that the concepts of startup thinking can probably transfer over. That said, it might be even better to use the badge acquisition as a stepping stone toward the real experience and have them do it like the article after, so they can understand how the different contexts affects their assumptions.

When I was in middle school all we had in terms of understanding "business" was an annual pushcart fair where most of the kids just chose to sell gobstoppers and we call it a day. This program seems to go more in depth in terms of giving these kids a genuine problem, having them think, communicate, and plan their actions, and most of all, putting their theories of business to the test with real world results they can use to assess their predictions of the world. These types of applicable real world activities WITH resulting data to challenge ones understanding is crucial. Probably why for us older kids with startup dreams, it's so important to just do something rather than just think/talk only about tech projects and ideas. The earlier one gets real projects out (first foray need not be perfect) and starts getting real user results the earlier we can test our assumptions and adapt, grow.

It would be great to see programs like this across the country.

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