School won't prepare our kids for the future. Here’s what will.

Hello and welcome to the Tuesday edition of the Prequel newsletter!

👋 New here? Welcome! You’ve just joined a community of over 90,000 other parents who are learning how to help their kids thrive in an ever-evolving, unpredictable future.

📬 In today’s email:

• How to prepare your kids for the future

• Real businesses kids have built

• Ivy’s top links from around the web

Let’s dive in!

💡 School won’t prepare our kids for the future. Here’s what will.
Plus: Successful businesses built by KIDS

The job market is changing rapidly.

And yet… schools are still focused on preparing kids for jobs that no longer exist.

Every year, we churn out millions of young people who have been taught how to follow rules and instructions — which is great, if you’re planning on having them do 1900s-style industrial labor.

But in the 21st century, this doesn’t work. That’s because our new world demands people who are self-learners, creators, and problem solvers. People who are resourceful and can adapt to constant change. People who can think independently and carve their own paths.

Kids aren’t learning these skills in school — instead, they’re memorizing facts and figures that aren’t going to help them in the real world.

So where can kids learn these skills? In my opinion, the best way is through entrepreneurship.

Building a business gives your kids real-world experience — and it’s not difficult to see how valuable it can be.

In school, everything you learn gets chalked up to your grade on a final exam. But in the real world, the only “test” is whether or not you were able to achieve your goals.

In school, when you fail, you get an “F” on your permanent record. But in the real world, failure just means you go back to the drawing board and try again (this time, armed with new insights about what doesn’t work).

When it comes to being successful, getting real-world experiences for your kids is paramount — but most kids don’t get any real-world experience until they graduate from college and start applying for jobs.

This may have been fine for previous generations, but more and more colleges (and employers!) are looking for applicants who already have experience in the real world. It’s going to become ever more important for your kids not just to have impressive-looking resumes, but to actually have a toolbelt of fundamental skills they can use.

This summer, Prequel helped 100+ teens build real-world, monetized startups. Here are some of the companies they built:

Here are even more stories of successful kid entrepreneurs from our programs:

• Meet Rhett, who is building Texas’s biggest bike park (and secured $40,000 in government funding)

• Meet Jane, who started her own creative design agency

• Meet Rishi, who raised over $1.6M in startup funding for a pet startup

We teach kids how to start businesses because we know entrepreneurship is one of the best ways to learn anything.

In other words, it’s not the earnings, but the learnings that make it so valuable for kids to start a business. Getting out into the real world, applying theories, and getting results — that’s what matters.

Just think about all the skills your kids will learn by starting a business: how to handle finances, how to sell, how to set and meet goals, how to work as a team, how to execute an idea, how to get funding, how to create a minimum viable product, and so much more. And so many of these skills are applicable to every other area of life — helping our kids become more ambitious, persistent, creative, and action-oriented.

Want your kids to get some real-world experience? Save the date for our July 28th Demo Day. Have your kids come hang out with us, and we’ll help them build a startup in 24 hours — seriously!

🚀 Ivy’s top links

Here’s what I’m reading and sharing this week!

• The shocking truth about teens and social media

• How Dolly Parton helped more kids graduate high school in her hometown

• How to teach your kids to appreciate financial security

Thanks for reading!

Until next time,
Ivy
CEO Prequel, BETA Camp, Apollo
Follow my journey on LinkedIn