In this TEDxKids talk, Kevin Judice (Co‑Founder and CEO of DiCE Molecules) addresses a middle‑school audience about using entrepreneurship as a tool to change the world. He frames entrepreneurship not just as starting a business for profit, but as a means to tackle hard, important problems. He outlines a step‑by‑step roadmap: (1) find something you love deeply, (2) become exceptionally good at it, (3) choose a hard problem that matters, (4) iterate through failure to develop a solution, (5) raise capital from various sources, (6) hire brilliant people, (7) work hard while having fun, and (8) focus on impact over personal wealth. Throughout, he illustrates each point with stories of well‑known and lesser‑known entrepreneurs—from Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to biotech pioneers Herb Boyer and Bob Swanson, social impact leaders like Paul Farmer and Chinwe Onyegoro, journalists, artists, and venture capitalists—showing that entrepreneurship spans many fields. He emphasizes that changing the world is the ultimate reward, and that money is secondary. The talk ends with encouragement that any student can start a venture that matters.
Chapters
What a great meeting, huh? You having fun? Now I was going to talk about how to start a company and how to make money and all that, but I thought, that's That's not quite right for a TED meeting. I'm going to talk about how to change the world by starting companies. So how many of you think you might want to change the world one day? Come on, I want to see every hand in the audience. You're in middle school, you're at a TED meeting, you're thinking creatively. That's great. All right, so I'm going to give you a job description that you really want. Ready? You want to be an entrepreneur when you grow up. You know why? Because entrepreneurs can be anything. It's a great word. It pretty much means anything you want it to. Most people think of it as somebody who starts a company, and that's how I tend to use it. Now these are some entrepreneurs. Some of them you might know, some of them you don't. Anybody know anybody up here? Steve Jobs, definitely. Anybody else? Facebook guy, right, Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg. You probably don't know the other ones, but you will by the end of the talk. They're people that I think are my personal heroes. Some of them are my friends, and I'm going to tell you how they do what they do. But we're going to start with a little spiel about how to start a company. All right? All right, so first thing you got to do is find something you love, and you really got to love it. It's got to be deep inside you, something that you really care a lot about. It could be anything. And the second thing you got to do is you have to get really good at it. Now it turns out if you really love what you're doing, this part's easy because it's just what you want to do, right? If you like skateboarding, you're going to skateboard every day. If you love insects, you're just going to be the kind of kid who's out roaming around the yard picking up interesting things. But you got to be really good at it. Now, The next part's kind of interesting. You have to choose a hard problem. You can safely assume all the easy problems have been solved, right? That's why they're easy. But if you choose something really hard and you think about it and you apply whatever skill you're really good at, that's the beginning of changing the world. So I chose this picture because these guys are trying to make clean energy out of water. That's a pretty hard problem, right? That's maybe the hardest problem, but it's one of the most important ones I can think of. Then the really hard part starts. You gotta have a solution. Well, guess what? Like Sadie just told you, there's a lot of failure involved in any success. So you gotta just try. You gotta think of something you think's gonna work and then give it your absolute best shot. Apply all the talents and all the love and passion you put into learning to be really good at something and give it a shot. Now, good news. You don't have to do this alone. First thing most people do when they're starting a company is raise some money. So you might ask, where do you get this money? The answer to that depends on what you're trying to do. You can get money from a lot of different sources. If your uncle happens to be one of the richest people in the world, you're probably all set. But if not, there are lots and lots of ways to get enough money to start your company and do what you're really passionate about. Okay? Next thing you gotta do is hire some really smart people. And I mean really smart people. Anybody know who this is? Yeah. So he's not available to be hired. But you can meet people that are so smart that they just blow you away. They know everything that you think you know and then some. Those are the people you should hire. All right, now you need to work hard. You're gonna have to work really hard at what you do to be good at it and to have a success. But guess what? It's a long journey. You're not going to be successful at anything overnight. You're not going to start a great company in 2 weeks. So you need to have fun. You need to have lots and lots of fun and plan on doing it for years and years. All right. Now, an important question. Do you want to get rich? Lots of good ways to do that. Almost none of them involve starting companies. You can be a banker. You can be all kinds of stuff. Personally, I think that's kind of boring. But if you want to get rich, that's a sure way to do it. If you want to change the world, do something that's important. You might get rich while you're doing that. You might not. But at the end of it all, what good is money if you can't change the world with it? All right, now I'm gonna talk you through some entrepreneurs that I either know of, like Steve Jobs. I never knew Steve Jobs, but I admire what he did. I'll tell you where he got his money and kind of what they did, and I'll do that for 4 or 5 or 6, I don't know. Different entrepreneurs, so you get a sense of what it's like to be someone who starts things. So now, how many of you guys, uh, have an iPhone? Significant number of people in the audience. So did you know that when I was your age, there were no personal computers? There was no Apple computer, there was no IBM personal computers. The idea that you could have your own computer was ridiculous. Who would want their own computer? To have a computer as powerful as your iPhone, it would have filled up this whole auditorium. The idea that you could have a computer like that on your desk when Steve Jobs started was absurd, and people asked him, why would you want one? The idea you'd have one in your pocket, and you could talk to people on it, access the internet, which also didn't exist, it was completely absurd. Jobs didn't care. He had a vision, and he started Apple. By raising some venture capital— we'll talk about what that is— and starting to build computers. Got really good at it, passionate about it, changed the world. Now, a guy you probably haven't heard of is named Herb Boyer. He's a scientist. I'm a scientist, so I'm kind of drawn to these sorts of folks. Herb and his partner Bob Swanson started a company called Genentech. It was the very first biotech company. And their idea was completely radical. It was crazy. People laughed. I said, we're going to make medicine in a special way that involves getting bacteria to make them. It was insane. People, like, you're out of your mind. I said, no, no, no, this is going to work and it's going to change medicine as we know it. Raised some venture capital, got started. 30 years later, there are Genentech medicines all over that save lives, especially in cancer patients. That's the vision. That's how you get there. All right. Now, some people you probably haven't heard of. This is one of my dear friends, Chinwe Onyegoro. She started a company about 5 years ago, and they're solely focused on making loans to small businesses in the United States, like the businesses you would start. That's really all they do, and they do that because the big banks kind of ignore little businesses. It's a cool business. She raised her money from venture capital. Got started. This guy is one of my heroes, Paul Farmer. He started an organization called Partners in Health about 20 years ago. They don't really make any money at all. As far as I know, Paul Farmer is not rich in any sense of the word. But in my mind, he's one of the most important people who started anything in the last two decades. Because what Farmer's group does, Partners in Health, is they distribute medicine in places where people are just too poor to afford it. And they give out a lot of important medicines. They treat tuberculosis. They treat cholera. They treat diseases that kill millions and millions and millions of people a year. And they prevent those deaths. And they do it in really creative ways. He gets his money from donations. He buys medicine from Western countries that have too much of it. He ships it to these places. It's an amazing effort. It's a labor of love. Not getting rich, but changing the world. Another one of my heroes, Maren McKenna, is a journalist. So you say, what's a journalist doing in a talk about starting companies? Well, there's lots of things you can do that will change the world. And what she's been doing for the past 10 years is writing about a very important set of diseases that no one's been paying attention to. And guess what? After 10 years, they're starting to pay attention. That's going to change things. It's going to impact human health worldwide, but especially here in the United States. That's really important. One of my dear friends, Shadia El Mayoush, she lives in Lebanon, which is right in the middle of the Middle East. Very politically tough neighborhood to live in. There's a lot of stuff going on in the Middle East, and there's almost always a war. Shadia's idea was to start a foundation that would gather 2 people from every country in that region together in a room for a week every year. She calls it the Mideast Leadership Initiative. And they get together and they talk about a lot of different things, but it's totally confidential so they can be as open as they need to be. And this is the kind of thing that grows on itself. So those 10 people go out and talk to 10 more people, talk to 10 more people. That's true leadership in a very quiet way. It's being an entrepreneur with no goal in mind that has anything to do with money, but everything to do with changing the world. Another guy that I had the privilege of meeting last year, Willie Foote, started a group called Root Capital. Again, although the word capital, which usually means money, is in the title, it's not about Willie getting rich. What he's trying to do is make loans to farmers in places, especially like sub-Saharan Africa and South America, where they just can't get money to do simple things like buy plows or seeds. Willie's whole job— he spends all year roaming around the world raising money and trying to get it to these farmers. You're not going to hear about him the way you hear about Steve Jobs, but he's one of my heroes. He's doing really important work. Another person I really admire is Sue Hellman. So Sue was in charge of a big chunk of the company Genentech back in the years when I worked there. She's well known in my field. When she left Genentech, she could have been CEO of almost anything she wanted to be CEO of. I mean, almost anything. She chose the Gates Foundation. How many of you guys have ever heard of the Gates Foundation? Yeah, so interesting story. So Bill Gates, richest man in the world, gave all his money away, nonprofit, and their job is to distribute this money worldwide to solve health problems. Sue's CEO of that. Cami Samuels is a venture capitalist. She actually distributes money to companies like mine that are trying to start up. She funded my first company to make life-saving antibiotics. I'm grateful to her for that. She's become a good friend. And then I had the privilege of meeting these two charming folks last night, Marianne and Sunny, who are here in Dallas. They're artists. They started a company called Color Condition. They did all of the art that you saw when you walked in, and they're great. So you can start anything you want that'll change the world. You can get your money just about anywhere you think of, and you can do almost anything. You just got to be passionate about it, really good about it. And make a difference. And I think you're off to a great start being at a TEDxKids meeting. Thanks for having me.
