 Entrepreneurship programs for teenagers, guys and girls, y'all all know that I'm very big on programs that have tangible results. So about that, running from my childhood, we had plenty of social programs that were provided by great nonprofits and great organizations. But guess what? The programs, once they delivered their service, there was nothing tangible, it was nothing for us to hold on to. So I'm very big on, as y'all guys and girls can see, when we do the Wesley Learns program that ties into schools, we award kids stocks for learning about financial literacy, which leaves a lasting imprint on students well after they have finished the program. But today I'm very excited about this episode. We have the Universal Startups. The thing I love, before I get into Universal Startups, that's the name of the company. And what I love about Universal Startups is that they award kids almost like Shark Tank. I'm making a simple plank. I love their entrepreneurship program. So what they have is teenagers get to go through their two-week program. They even, they have it virtually. And what happens is they have to pitch. They have to do a pitch almost like Shark Tank and the kid and the teenagers actually win prizes as well. So not only do they win prizes at the end, they also learn, they learn how to pitch to real companies and real organizations. And also they're getting taught by professors from the top universities like Cornell, John Hopkins, Georgetown, you name it, right? But I had to bring in the founder today, the founder and one of our partners at the Global Children Financial Literacy Foundation. We had to bring in Mr. Mark Stern. Hopefully I didn't butcher his name there. Stern, I think he told me. He's out there in Maryland. How you doing, Mark? Awesome, thanks, Prince, for having me. Definitely glad to have you. The first thing out there, I know that you are a professor at the University of Maryland and I wanna know what got you into doing this for kids. You know, I know you was talking briefly before the show of you coming from, was it Argentina? Yeah, my family's from Argentina. My parents came over in the late 70s and I was born here and love their spirit, love their entrepreneur spirit and it's kind of passed down to me and so I'm trying to give back as best as I can. Okay, so the entrepreneurship spirit, can you please explain to people how does your entrepreneurship program work for teenagers? Yeah, awesome, thanks, Prince. Well, essentially like you indicated before, our program's taught by top tier university professors, professors from Hopkins, Cornell, Georgetown University of Maryland and we bring these kids into the program. They form teams, they're giving mentors by amazing entrepreneurs, they have student coaches, they come up with their own concept using theories like design thinking and lean methodology and they go through the whole process just as if they're in college, right? Same deal, they come up with their own solutions for problems that they really have in their own community. So they're really thinking about how can I fix things in my community to make things better? So it's so cool with some of the companies they come up with and at the end, as you indicated, they will have a pitch in front of amazing entrepreneurs in the DMV area and they can win prizes, cash prizes, gift cards, but more importantly, they're taking away skills, right? Like I love what you're doing with the financial literacy, our goal is to give them awesome skills to be collaborative, creative, working a team, be inclusive, problem solvers and we actually measure 30 different skills throughout the program and the results are amazing. We're just, we can't be thrilled, any more thrilled than we are dealing with these kids. They're just the opportunity and optimism that they have after the program is just through the roof. So, Mark, someone who's listened to this and they're watching this and they're saying, hey, how can I get this into my school? Of course I want entrepreneurship. Of course it makes sense for my kids to get internships and scholarships. How can I make that happen? Awesome, so we really do partner with school districts and nonprofits and we work with these kids for eight months. Typically it costs like this kind of program where you work with a student for eight months, can be anywhere from like $27,000 to $54,000. The cost is really outrageous and unfair to these low income and disadvantaged kids. Our entire program for eight months is $2,000 of students and what normally happens is the nonprofits will then go out for additional funding sources. They'll partner with the foundation or get a corporate sponsor and school will do the same thing with grants, corporate sponsors and donors but this is the way to help these kids. We talked about giving them the skills to succeed in the workplace and these skills are completely transferable. You don't have to start your own venture. If you work a general electric or IBM you have to be able to work in teams. You have to be able to problem solve. So man, we need to teach these skills to these kids and nothing beats entrepreneurship. Okay, now your program, how does exactly your entrepreneurship program? Is it eight hours a day? Is it two hours a day? Exactly, how does Universal Startup Program entrepreneurship for teenagers? Can I do this on the weekend? Do I need to do this? Is it an all day event? Exactly, what are the details? Is it exactly how the program runs? Yeah, very cool. So during the summer it is 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and that's a live class. In October we run another cohort and we have two options there. We have the live class which is two hours once a week on Thursdays but we also have an on-demand class during October through January where a student can take it anytime they want. They can do it on the weekends, they can do it in the morning. They have to hit certain deadlines but a lot of students enjoy that freedom to say, you know what, I wanna do it after dinner or on Saturday morning and we enable them to do this through the on-demand course. The on-demand course is taught by Stanford D School Coach. I mean it's top notch. It's incredible professors helping these students learn these skills. Okay, so it can be self-paced or self-taught as well. You can go with self-paced companies, not self-paced companies but self-paced process to get it done. It can make it make sense. So sometimes, you know, I hear some people say, oh wow, you know, eight hours a day that's a lot or if it's self-taught would the kids really stay engaged, right? Now, how do you work to keep the kids engaged to say, hey, every weekend, not every weekend but every week on Thursday, I have to take a two-hour course in order to complete this course? Yeah, it's so good. So we actually just ran a cohort in June and parents came in and said, the only complaint they have is that we wish we had more time with the kids and the professors. Like they love the program. It's you, you know, you sit in class in high school or college or wherever it may be and you're forced to take a subject that may or may not be interesting. Here, you're out there, you're interviewing customers, you're building prototypes, you know, you're building a business. You can make money, you can donate to your community, you can solve problems. It's everything, you know, that I wanted as a student but now I'm able to give as a professor. It's so engaging. It's so much fun. It's not, you know, slides for three hours and you're watching someone and you fall asleep. It's, man, you're out there doing stuff. And it's so, it's so much fun for the kids. That's our least our concern is, you know, the engagement of their, they're so engaged. It's pretty fun. Okay. I know you spoke about being first generation American, right? My question to you, we look at these things, you know, in school, we learning in calculus, geometry, trigonometry, this or that or whatever. Why aren't, why is this not taught in schools? Yeah. You know, I think a lot of that is legacy and tradition. You know, this is the way it's always been taught. You sit in a classroom, you know, you sit down for eight hours and you listen to a professor speak or a teacher speak. You know, this is kind of the new wave. This is, you know, people talk about skills and be able to, you know, shake someone's hand and, you know, interview and look at your resume, basic components that you and I have been living with for so long, these kids aren't really taught basic fundamental soft skills and entrepreneurial skills. I wish I had a better answer why it's not taught. I'm gonna tell you what we're committed to engaging schools, you know, bringing our methodology to these kids so the kids love school. There's no reason why you can't enjoy school. In fact, studies haven't done that you're actually more creative during play, right? So why make things boring when we know that limits your creativity? Let's make it fun. So that's what we do. Okay. So one of the things, one of the things I was, I struggled with when I was in high school in junior high as well is I had a hard time learning things that I couldn't relate to reality. So for prime example, when you're taking geometry and algebra two and you learn all these angles and this angle does this. I'm trying to visualize this. I can't place it in my head. So it doesn't seem to be real world to me. But if you tell me, hey, Johnny ate two slices of pizza and you had eight, you know, eight slices. Oh, that made sense. Somebody ate his pizza. But that's what it felt like when I was in school. One of the things I struggled with was trying to learn about something that I couldn't visualize like, what's the weapon? What's in it for me? What's in it for me? What does this mean? How do I make this realistic in my world? Why am I learning this? And that's one of the biggest things I learned with, you know, one of the things I like about your company as well is that you are giving real world things, tangible results that can go out somebody can use when they get out of it, right? So how do you feel about society? Or what is your plan? Do you have a plan to implement yourself into society of like maybe changing the culture, changing the conversation? First of all, I love what you said. And it's so true. Not just for you, for me, all students. I, a teacher was struggling with a student in the statistics class. And, you know, he just, he said, he just doesn't get it. I said, well, I know the child. He loves baseball. Why don't you spend a couple of weeks of just teaching statistics through baseball? And he loves to watch the nationals, which is our local team here in DC. His grade skyrocketed, right? He was able to apply real life statistics and sees the value of statistics. So it was very cool. For us, imagine, first of all, 69% of low income and disadvantaged kids don't go to college, which is such a shame. That means they're four times more likely to be unemployed. And if they are employed, their salaries are 40% less than their colleagues who are in college, right? That's ridiculous. If we can get these kids to college or get them great jobs, you're gonna improve the tax base in your city. You're gonna make more income in the community because, you know, those individuals are gonna have their own salaries. It just helps everybody. So we wanna study. It's funny you say that we're in the process now with partnering with the school district, but we're gonna study the entrepreneurship impact that we can have at these kids from high school all the way into the business community. Because we believe that. We believe entrepreneurship can change the world. And let me tell you one more thing. Don't ever say that I'm not smart enough to be an entrepreneur, right? The average GPA of millionaires is 2.9 in college. We're not the best guys in the world, but we got hustle, right? We got the ability to create, be collaborative, think differently, don't be afraid of failure. And all the kids who go through my program increase their capabilities in all those levels. All those levels, it's incredible. They're less risk-averse. They're not afraid of the future. 83% of them are more optimistic about their future now. I mean, that's what we want. We want to give these kids, you know, the empowerment to be awesome because they are. Okay. Now, what we're gonna do right now, well, we're gonna jump into speaking about those disadvantaged areas and programs, not programs, but areas and to see what we can do to make them better, definitely like that. But to everybody that's out there, we're gonna take a quick break. And I mean a very quick break. Don't you touch it down. Don't you move. We're gonna be back with Mark here from Universal Startups. Y'all stay tuned. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines, and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence and finding greatness. I feature a wide range of amazing guests who share valuable insights about how going beyond the lines leads to success in everything you do in life. I'm looking forward to you joining me every Monday at 11 a.m. Aloha. Entrepreneurship for teenagers. Entrepreneurship for teenagers around the globe. Something I'm very big on because like if you haven't been following the show, Mark here said, hey, 69% of impoverished students don't go off to college. If they don't go to college, meaning they're left with low-paying jobs, and if you're left with low-paying jobs, who wants to have a low-paying job? This is when you start to look into crime and other things like that. So how can we fix low-income areas? One thing I like about our guest here for university startups is that he spoke about, hey, I want to help three million kids go through entrepreneurship programs by putting them through a pipeline, also giving them professors from the top universities and from Cornell to, from Cornell to Georgetown and John Hopkins, right? So what I further do, let me bring my guest back on here. We have the founder, CEO, university startups coming out of Maryland. Mark, how's it going? Awesome, nice seeing you again, Prince. Oh yeah, definitely. So I want you to get into this. If you go into an impoverished area, people are saying, hey, well, I come from a single parent household, maybe drug infested, whatever the case may be. Like I recently just came back from a city of Detroit and I was like, what do you do? You can't just go there and put a fast food restaurant there because those are really not how paying jobs for the most part and who can really afford what you bring. How do you re-energize that community? What do you guys have to say, Mark? Awesome. So I mean, it's a challenging question for all of us and I really believe in the power of entrepreneurship because it empowers you, right? So I don't have a specific solution that I can go into Detroit or other difficult areas and say, this is how Mark would do it. Instead, I want to teach these kids empowerment and the skills necessary that they can go out and come up with their own solutions because they know their community is better than I do, right? But we can mentor them. We can show them the methodology. We can show them the process so they can become amazing entrepreneurs come up with amazing solutions to really build this ecosystem within their community that it rocks, that it's so amazing. And let me give you an example. I had high school teams that just graduated in June. One team is her and her students live in a very high crime area and there's a lot of anxiety. They hear gunfire at night. It's just, it's a difficult environment. So they came up with, it was kind of like off of Build-A-Bear where they would have their bears but they can do a QR code and they would swipe their phone. If they're struggling, they could automatically be connected to a psychologist or psychiatrist to help them walk through their anxiety. It was just so creative. I mean, they were just amazing. Another team had, you know, they're like, well, I grew out of my clothes. What am I gonna do with their clothes? So they came up with a recycling business where they could start selling all these great clothes that, you know, were almost new but, you know, they wouldn't warn that much but they could pass them down to other people in the neighborhood at discounted prices and they could start making money. So that's the keys. Really empowering them, giving them skills, giving them know-how to build their own amazing companies, right? Developing the Mark Staring Company for them, you know, won't work. They need that power and we restrict them too often. We say you have to do it this way. That's not the way I believe. I believe give them the methodology, give them the tools, support them financially, support them through mentorship and support them through real instruction to, again, to empower themselves to come up with amazing solutions in their own communities. Mark, and I agree with you cold-heartedly because I think that if you wanna change the future, you change the children and if you wanna change the outcome, you change the mind. So by having some people think that, hey, we'll go in and we'll come in with a program that will just give away, you know, food or just give away clothes. And I think that that's not empowering, you know. I think that, hey, you have to have something that, hey, you have to create your own. And plus when you create your own, you have a sense of ownership. The community feels like yours. So when you're there, you're renting that apartment and you go down the street to the grocery store and buy your groceries and you may stop at a fast food restaurant and grab some fast food. You don't have that sense of ownership. You know, you feel like a person who's just, I'm just existing here, right? I'm just existing here. I don't feel like I have a piece of what's going on. So I, and I have something that I noticed is when you go into a home or when you purchase a home in your suburban neighborhood, everybody feels like this is my house. We all have an invested interest because I live here, you live here, our kids play here. So we all are doing neighborhood watches. We all watch it now for each other. We're all changing rules and things like that. But in lower income areas, you don't see that sense of ownership and you gotta ask yourself, why don't you have the sense of ownership? The sense of ownership is because the community don't own anything in the community. So wanting to do something puts it there. So I'm definitely with you with Empowering. That's why I love the program of showing kids how to do it. And the mentorship is very, very important because they always say, if you wanna see a future, look at the people you speak to the most or look at the people that are around you. So if you don't know anybody, if I come from a low income area, how can I get to know somebody? So I definitely like that as well. So I definitely like what you're saying with Empowering, funding, mentorship and guiding with them for the long term, not just the short term. So now, looking at this now, have you noticed any other country that may have done something better than what we're doing with youth entrepreneurship or do you think America is number one? I love the American spirit. I love the American entrepreneurship. That's why so many people wanna come here and that's why there's such a diverse, great population with so many different ideas, so many different cultures. I mean, if you wanna look at great startup nations, I mean, Israel is a top startup nations. There are a few countries in South America that have some really interesting. Asia obviously has got some hotbed of manufacturing but I just think, before I look to other countries, I needed more here in the United States to help these kids be the next generation of awesome entrepreneurs. And I feel that, you said it so right, success leaves clues. When you mentioned mentorship and seeing that, I think it's a pinge upon me and my colleagues to show the way for these next generation of entrepreneurs that never really had an opportunity to take these kind of classes. They don't teach entrepreneurship in most high schools, right? We need to be the leaders teaching them and you and your part with the financial leadership part to teach these kids. Imagine if we set up a restaurant in one of those areas where they learn back of the house skills, front of the house skills, the financial literacy of inventory costs and running a restaurant. I mean, there's so much we can do to empower kids to really lead the next generation. So I love what we do here in the United States. I think we can do better. When I think of innovation and creativity, I think in the U.S. Okay. And I can't have seen that as well. Now, what have you experienced has been the biggest problem with university? Not a problem, but maybe not a fork in a row, but hurdle that you've seen with university starts like, hey, this is where we need some more help here or this is what's going wrong or there's something I want to see get better. What is that if you can see it? I mean, from a company side, we need to be out there more. I want to help more kids. You know, our cohorts are filled. On October cohort, we got 75% filled. We only need 25% more kids, but I want to do more. I want the word out there. I want to get more and more professors that have written me notes and, hey, we want to be part of this work. Recruiting more professors, people with the mission that want to help these kids to help these high school kids. But I need to be more engaged with more and more nonprofits, more and more school districts. I just feel like we can do so much more. We're just tipping the iceberg. We've six times our growth in the last six months. I want to go much further. So I'm looking for partners and nonprofits and school districts to join us on this mission to really help these kids. Okay. And you can do this second. It can be part of the after school program too, right? Oh yeah. Yeah, during the school year it is after school. Okay. So you have a nice after school program or I can see that, you know, I can see some boys and girls clubs have teen centers. If they have, you know, they have to have the computers. Now, what would they need? What would the students actually need to facilitate this? Yeah, so they do need a computer and they do need Wi-Fi. We're actually looking to figure out ways to help kids get computers and get Wi-Fi because that was a concern for some of these kids, you know, they had the difficulty getting Wi-Fi. Some, you know, had to take the course on their phone because they didn't have a computer. So we're looking for ways and we're looking for donations to help these kids get computers because that's our next step. I really want to make sure, you know, they have a computer. It's just something that you and I take for granted. You know, we have a computer, we have Wi-Fi. Man, some of these kids don't. So they need it. They need it for their work. When they go into the work world, they're going to need it for college. So I'd love to get these kids' computers. Awesome, okay. Now, what do you want to leave to the live audience and the audience that would catch the playback? Is there anything you want to leave them with? Yeah, we have an October cohort with the Georgetown University professor. We're looking for about 15 more kids. You know, so we're looking for a nonprofit partner or a school, you know, school district that's looking to send 15 kids to our program. You know, we'd love to partner with you. They can reach out to me. That'd be awesome. Awesome, okay. Well, how can people find you? You're social media or how can people find you? How people can keep in touch with university startups? Yeah, so www.university-startups.com or they can email me M-S-T-E-R-E-N at university-startups.com. I'd love to speak to anyone, you know, if they can help if they want to be a mentor or a partner with us. You know, anyone that wants to join us on this mission to help these kids, you know, we're all for it. All right. Well, Maura, did you have fun? I did. It's awesome. You're great. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for being on. I know it's pretty late over there on the East Coast, but I know it's in the evening in Hawaii and it's kind of the middle in Denver. We're all over the place, but that's a great thing. Awesome. But definitely. So, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and children, ladies and gentlemen, you are now tuned in to The Prince of Investment, live here in Denver, Colorado, by the way, of Haluahua, Hawaii. Until the next video, podcast, cartoon, episode or whatever else craze you see me do around this wonderful globe, peace, be safe. I'm out and thank you.