From Youthful Ventures to Business Acumen #mindset #business #startups

I started my first business when I was like, you know, 12 or 13 years old. And I, um, and, and I think— what was that? Uh, it was a speech and debate camp. Um, so kind of a friend approached me and said, hey, we should run a camp together. We ran it together and then it became this big thing. It became, um, you know, 150+ students in a summer. By our 4th or 5th summer, we were doing like, I don't know, $50 grand or something in revenue. I don't, I really don't remember.

At 13 years old.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, but were you as nerdy as that sounds, or did you just figure out how to tap into that kind of, uh, need in the community? Uh, I missed the question.

I said, were you as nerdy as that sounds? Oh yeah. Or did you just figure out? Yeah. Okay.

I was nerdy, but I lived in a pretty nerdy—

but I didn't— speech and debate feels like a whole nother level. I know Jesse did it too, so there's, there's some correlation maybe there of success.

It's, it's by far the number one activity you can put your kid into if you want them to be, you know, happy and successful, because it teaches public speaking, it teaches thinking, which is probably the number one thing it teaches is just logical thinking. It also teaches philosophy as well as it's competitive. So it has honestly like a ton of benefits. And I really am grateful I had that. I wasn't as good a debater as I was a teacher and a business person. So I basically started the education business and realized that amongst my peers, we were the number one debate team in the country. My sophomore year and my senior year and completely bootstrapped. We were like the only team without a coach, without a formal coach. Didn't pay for anything. And we basically made, made, used the camp to fund the program.