He launched a sweaty startup in high school. Now he'll be a millionaire by 18

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, today we're trying something new. We have three high school students, ninth graders, tenth graders, eleventh graders, that all are running their own business while they're in school. And not just like, oh, here's my idea. These guys have real revenue, tens of thousands of dollars in profit that they're making as 14 year olds. It's crazy. And so we invited them in, we're doing office hours with them. So they bring us their biggest problem, and we try to help them solve it in like 10 minutes. And whether you're a high school or college student, or you're just running your own business, I think there's gonna be something in this for everybody, because there's a beauty in these kids who they're like, I just don't know anything, but they're crushing it.

**Sam Parr** (0:32)
Yeah, there's a lot of people who listen to this podcast that wanna start something, and they overthink it. And there's a beauty to being ignorant, and these kids are ignorant. And because of that, they create amazing stuff. And I think that you should steal that attitude.

**Shaan Puri** (0:55)
All right, we're doing something fun today. We have high school students who have existing businesses. They're running businesses. They're making a lot of revenue. They're making money, and they're here for office hours. And this is all part of our buddy Anand, who's here with us. He's running this new thing called the Formidable Fellows. And I think, Anand, this is like a precursor. You wanna launch a school someday, a new school for entrepreneurship, and this is kinda your MVP, is that right? You started giving out grants to middle and high school students.

**Anand** (1:23)
Yeah, so we're building a national network of schools of entrepreneuring. It takes a while to build physical schools. So my friend Raj and I started something called the Formidable Fellowship. And yeah, we kind of, I think like Gen Z is probably gonna be the most entrepreneurial generation. And we saw a lot of them out there. And so we started a non-profit with 500K. We're given $1,000 grants to middle and high school entrepreneurs. And so we kind of just had our first class, had 23 grantees. You'll meet three of the great ones today. And yeah, you know, kind of along the way, other awesome entrepreneurs, they're Mesh from HubSpot, Sean Griffey from Industry Dive. A bunch of other folks have been contributors.
So now we've got even more capital to give out to these young entrepreneurs.

**Sam Parr** (2:14)
This is like your second mountain. So basically, you started a company called CB Insights that is in the range of $100 million in revenue or something like that. Now, is this like your, this is what you do after you've made a bunch of money and you want to impact the world positively, besides creating, you know, business intelligence tools?

**Anand** (2:32)
Yeah, it's the second mountain. I think that's a good way of putting it, right? I think like if you could build a system that increases human potential, like that's a pretty tremendous thing to do. And I think we can do it in a way that will make money and eventually rival the public school system. That's our goal.

**Shaan Puri** (2:50)
All right. Well, 500K. And how did you find these kids? So they reached out, you reached out to them. How'd you find all these founders?

**Anand** (2:57)
Yeah, we reached out to a lot of entrepreneurship teachers at schools. And that was, I think, primarily the way a little bit of social media, some parents who found us on Twitter and LinkedIn, but yeah, I think a lot of them just, you know, word of mouth. And so yeah, we got a few hundred applicants to first go around, you know, qualifications where you had to have revenue. So that was kind of a hard filter we had. There's a lot of folks who have sort of a dream or they're starting something to burnish a college application and we didn't want that. We wanted people who were actually building. And so yeah, we narrowed it down pretty quickly and found some people.

**Shaan Puri** (3:32)
Sam, did you have any revenue in middle school or high school? I barely had facial hair.

**Sam Parr** (3:37)
Yeah, it's pretty insane. When I was a kid in grade school, it was like make a business plan and fake present it to a board of directors. And you think that like, you know what I mean, like dear board of directors. And it was nonsense. And I'm seeing their bios. This is so much more interesting than what we were doing. What were you at 14? I don't even think I knew what that word entrepreneur meant.