Dear parent,
I have spent twenty years building businesses, at Walmart's global e-commerce arm, at Sanofi in Singapore, as the co-founder of a senior-care company that was patented and acquired by Stanley Black & Decker, and now as COO of a Y Combinator–backed health company that has grown six-hundred percent under my leadership. MBA, University of Maryland. Hundreds of people hired. Distribution lines I built in four countries. Two patents on my name.
I am also Fionn's mother. And if you are reading this late at night, after the kids are asleep, I suspect you are carrying the same question I was carrying about him, the one that eventually brought me to build this:
Will he be ready? Whatever the world looks like in twenty years, will he be okay?
A few years ago, my son came home from a summer camp with a pitch deck. He was small enough that I had to lift him onto the couch to present it. The deck was clean. It had a problem statement, a product, a price, and a market.
He has since built a real business selling Pokémon stickers at conventions. He is not afraid of strangers. He does not carry a scarcity mindset around money. He has held an actual customer complaint and figured out how to handle it. He is not yet a teenager.
I watch him do this work and I notice the question loosen in my chest. Not because I think he will become a famous founder, most kids will not, and he may not, but because I can already see that whatever he does next, he will do it from a place of knowing. He has already met the world. The world has already paid him. That is a foundation that does not depend on luck, or timing, or which industries grow.
What troubles me is how late that realization usually comes for most people, and what it costs the ones who never reach it.
Not because they all should have started businesses. Most of them shouldn't have. The corporate path, the professional path, the public-service path, these are good paths, and the world needs people who walk them well. The cost is something quieter. It is the option that was never on the table. The career choices made under a pressure they didn't know they were under. The freedom to pick freely, that fear of the unknown quietly took away.
First Dollar School exists so that experience arrives earlier.
I am not building this institution because I want every young person to become a founder. I am building it because I want every young person to be able to choose, in adulthood, what they want their life to look like, without fear standing in for an experience they never had.
That is what I want for Fionn. It is what I want for every Founder who walks through this door.
We cannot give them certainty about the future. No one can. But we can give them the conviction that whatever the future looks like, they're prepared to thrive in it.
That is the work.