I recently had the pleasure of attending the 2013 Young Entrepreneur Showcase. I had the chance catch up with one of the world's leading youth entrepreneurship teachers, Maria Jimenez, who helped bring these students through this exciting program.
My heart beat in excitement as I watched each presenter. Their mastery of business concepts and understanding of their market opportunities amazed me.
Have you ever had a perfect day? I had lived 21,815 days and never had a perfect one until April 23, 2013.
For the last three years, I have attended the SALT conference in Las Vegas. The brain child of Anthony Scaramucci, it is the top conference in the world for hedge funds and money managers. This year was the best.
"The Possible Project was born out of an idea that came to us more than 30 years ago, while we were living in San Francisco. Each day we were overcome with the number of disengaged young people who were living on the streets, seemingly without direction."
NFTE today runs entrepreneurship education programs in over a dozen countries. Perhaps this rapid global growth would not have happened if I had not had a pivotal meeting in 1992 with one of our greatest modern entrepreneurs and philanthropists, Ewing Marion Kauffman.
Kelso was a true revolutionary in finance and ownership education. He was the inventor of the employee stock ownership plan. We at NFTE had two such experiments -- one in Newark with Jersey Mike's and one in the South Bronx with NFTE Solutions.
With the 25th anniversary of NFTE fast approaching, my friends Marisol, Serena and Vincent recently met with me to share their life stories. These three students were all in the same remedial business class at Jane Addams High School in the Bronx, 28 years ago.
As I move to my next growing company and opportunities, I thought I should take pause and share four things I have learned so far about being in career transition.
I was extremely eager to learn about their two business ideas: one was a website for triathletes and the other was a personal branding consultancy by teens for teen artists.
After sharing my personal business background and my inspiration for launching NFTE, I outlined the 12 things every young person should know about business.
After 20 years these are the 11 things that we have learned about running an effective teacher training in youth entrepreneurship.
As I sat and listened, I realized that entrepreneurship is a way for people to tell their own stories, a reflection of themselves and what they are and have learned.
In that historic retreat on entrepreneurial education, we finalized the NFTE Wall Chart -- see below -- a guide for what each teacher should try and get students to do to graduate from NFTE. The effects were felt.
While on 23rd Street, we decided to start getting serious on the lesson plans. Mike Caslin had the insight that we needed to standardize and we started planning our first ever teacher training. The first one was in Boston and it was a disaster.
Confronting his demons led Wisenthal to discover his passion: writing about the problems of troubled kids, giving them a voice, and helping them turn their lives around. I recently caught up with Paul at the Good Stuff Diner as he was preparing for his next workshop.
Here's a new challenge: Try explaining intellectual property to young people who have been downloading pirated movies and music since they first encountered computers.
Year two of SUS kicked off in late June 2012. The studentsdove deep into the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. In addition to completing business plans, students accomplished one of the hardest things in the business world -- making their first sale.
For parents and educators, the rapidly developing world of technology is enough to make one's head spin. However, for the younger generation, learning how technology works and finding a business niche is the gold rush of their time.
Youth unemployment is one of the biggest problems in the world. Its impact is particularly evident in Europe. I believe youth entrepreneurship education can bring these horrible unemployment rates down.
While entrepreneurship is an interesting and often appealing concept to youth because it speaks to their ability to make money, successful entrepreneurship is a farfetched reality if students cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide.
If you're running a social enterprise and you want to raise money to fund it, you will need to design a data-collection and research strategy to show donors and peers that you're actually achieving your goals. I learned this lesson the hard way.
I've seen a lot of education programs in my 32-year career as an educator. I thought I had seen it all -- that is, until I visited Mexico City in early December of this year.
Building on the successes of its pilot year that saw 12 of 16 student businesses generate revenue, year two of Startup Summer kicked off in early July 2012.
As a regional executive director and national team player achieving these outcomes never felt like a job -- as cliche as it sounds, but I know you can relate, it was a calling.
