One Question Friday: How Will You Teach Your Kids To Be Entrepreneurial?

**Shaan Puri** (0:15)
This is One Question Friday. I'm Shaan, and it's just me today. Doing these episodes, these One Question Fridays, I kind of like these. It's fun, it's fun to hear the listeners and hear their questions.
And then I really put thought into this. So this one, I heard it before I did it so I could think it through.
Usually I do these off the cuff, but hey, little prep never hurt anybody. So let's listen to this question together and then I'll give you my answer.

**Sophia** (0:39)
Shaan, last Friday you talked about the value of earning that first dollar by selling the bands. I know that your kids are still pretty young, but I wanted to know how are you gonna teach them to be entrepreneurial and when are you going to start?

**Shaan Puri** (0:55)
Okay, great. Thanks Sophia for the question. If you didn't hear this before, I shared this story about how I had been working on a business, a startup, I was 21 years old, I was with my best friends and we were working on a business for about a year and somewhere in like the nine month mark, we realized, we were just sitting around one day and we're like, man, it just feels like we're just going through the motions. And not that we were being lazy, but like literally we were almost like acting out doing a startup. It's like, oh, we do this plan and then we talk to this advisor and then we raise money from this investor. It's like, we're doing everything except for the business part, which is we take a product, we sell it to a customer and then the customer's happy.
And we're like, man, we've been going for almost a year now and we haven't even made a dollar. Like, how can we call ourselves, we were winning all these awards, Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Rising Entrepreneur, Most Promising Startup. And I was like, man, it's all BS. We haven't actually even done anything. And so we took a 48 hour challenge. For one weekend, we were gonna try to make our first dollar. We were trying to make, we set a goal of trying to make a thousand dollars in a weekend. And we ended up doing something very simple. We created these like wristbands. Like if you remember the old Livestrong bands, but thicker, fatter, we called it the fat band. It was the fatband.com and we were customizing them. So we found a drop shipper that would let us write somebody's name or their fraternity's name or their school's name, whatever, on these wristbands. And we can basically sell you a customized pack of a hundred wristbands or whatever. And it would cost us whatever, 30 cents to make these things.
And then we could sell each one for $1.20 or something like that. And it worked. We made like, I don't know, $1,400 in that weekend and it felt so good. And I feel like I learned more about business in that one weekend than I had the full nine months because I had to come up with a product. I couldn't overthink the brand name, all that good stuff. You know, had to get our first sale, had to figure out how to sell, had to figure out how to create a website, take payments online, all this good stuff. So now this question is about kids. Now, I guess I'll point out, I really wasn't, I don't know, I was kind of a kid. I was 21 years old. But my parents didn't do anything in that moment to help me have that aha moment to get that first taste of entrepreneurship.
The light bulb for me came on later than I think you usually hear. We often hear these stories about, oh, Mark Kubin or Elon Musk, and when they were 11 years old, they were, you know, they were, created a CD-ROM company and they were selling it, you know, in the neighborhood, or the lemonade stand. Honestly, I didn't have any entrepreneurial ambitions. You would have never guessed when I was a kid that I would be an entrepreneur. Having said that, I do think there are things that I will try to do with my kids. I got two little kids, they're two and one years old now, to help them be more entrepreneurial. And here's what they are. So I'll break it down into a couple of categories.
Here are the foundational do's and don'ts for me when I think about how to teach my kids. The first is there's no rush. I will not push them into being an entrepreneur or doing, you know, like telling them that this is the path.