I still remember the first time my nephew showed me his Scratch game. He was nine, eyes shining like Christmas lights, bouncing on the couch. “Look, Uncle! The cat flies around and collects coins!” Cute, right?
Then I asked the question that killed the mood: “Cool… but who’s gonna pay you for it?”
Silence. The cat kept flying in circles on the screen. He had no answer, because nobody ever taught him there could be one.
Here’s the wild part: by thirteen, Mark Zuckerberg already had paying businesses for his little web tools. Same with the WhatsApp guy, Jan Koum — tinkering with code and sniffing out what people actually needed. Nick D’Aloisio sold his news app to Yahoo for thirty million bucks at seventeen. Seventeen. Most kids that age are grinding Fortnite skins, and this dude cashed out eight figures because he built something people wanted to buy.
Meanwhile, your average “learn to code” camp ends with a folder full of zombie shooters and flappy-bird clones gathering digital dust. Teachers pat them on the head — “Great job on the if-statements!” — and everyone goes home thinking that’s what coding is.
It’s not.
Coding without customers is just expensive finger painting.
What if we flipped the whole thing? Teach kids to code the same way real founders do: spot a problem that annoys actual humans, talk to those humans, build the smallest thing that makes the annoyance go away, charge a few bucks, see what happens. Rinse, crash, burn, try again.
When you do that — when you glue entrepreneurial thinking onto coding — something magic happens. You don’t just end up with kids who can make apps.
You end up with kids who make companies.
And honestly, I think that’s the only way we’re gonna keep up in a world where AI writes clean code faster than any human ever will. The code itself? Becoming cheap. The nose for problems worth solving, the guts to ship ugly version one, the hustle to get the first ten paying users — that stuff AI still sucks at.
That’s what we should be teaching.
Everything else is just typing practice.
Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Is the Real Superpower (Not Just Knowing Python)
Look, I get it. Everyone’s freaking out about “kids need to code or they’ll be left behind.” Fair. But here’s the dirty secret nobody says out loud:
In five years, your ability to write a for-loop is going to be about as rare and valuable as knowing how to use Microsoft Word in 2010.
AI is already spitting out bug-free React components while eating a sandwich. By the time today’s eight-year-old hits college, ChatGPT-17 will write entire backends before you finish your coffee.
So what’s left for humans?
Spotting the itch. Figuring out who’s scratching it raw. Building the jankiest possible scratch-post that still makes the pain stop — and then having the balls to ask for five bucks.
That’s the part AI still can’t do worth a damn.
Spotting the itch, validating it with real humans, and then turning the solution into actual revenue is still 99 % human superpower. And when the revenue is already there but the kid needs fuel to go from $5k/month to $50k/month (or $500k/month), the very next skill they need is raising money from strangers online… which, surprise, is the same damn process, just with bigger stakes. I break down exactly how teenagers (and adults) do it today — cold DMs, revenue screenshots, viral threads, closing angels in the DMs — in this short guide.
Jobs in 2035 Won’t Care About Your GitHub Streak
Every parent has seen those scary stats: “65% of children entering primary school today will work in jobs that don’t exist yet.” Cool flex, World Economic Forum, but what does it actually mean?
It means the safe path — grind LeetCode, get CS degree, join FAANG, collect 401k — is turning into a trap. The big winners won’t be the best employees. They’ll be the kids who can create the next job category out of thin air.
Think about it. The guy who started Canva wasn’t the world’s greatest graphic designer or the best coder. He just noticed that normal people were terrified of Photoshop and would happily pay $12.99 a month to never open it again.
Problem → simple solution → billions.
That mental leap is what we need to drill into kids before they’re old enough to care about college applications.
Coding Is Becoming the New Literacy. Entrepreneurship Is the New PhD
Reading and writing used to be elite skills. Now every toddler can do it, and nobody gets a medal.
Same thing is happening with code.
My twelve-year-old neighbor built a working Discord bot in two afternoons using nothing but YouTube and Copilot. Two afternoons. Ten years ago that would’ve been a college final project.
The bar is on the floor, and it’s dropping every month.
If all we teach kids is syntax, we’re basically handing them a typewriter in the age of voice dictation. Technically impressive, totally pointless.
But teach them to treat code like a money printer — to sniff out pain points, validate demand before writing a single line, ship fast, break stuff, collect real money, feel the sting of angry customers, taste the rush of the first sale…
Now you’re building something future-proof.
Because no matter how good the robots get at writing the code, somebody still has to decide what’s worth building.
And that somebody might as well be your kid.
The Six Rules We Actually Teach In Our Garage Classes
No fluff. These are the only things we hammer into the kids, every single session.
- Problems first, code never: You don’t get to open the laptop until you’ve annoyed at least ten real humans with questions. Bonus points if one of them says “I’d pay to make this go away.”
- Talk to strangers:Customer interviews are mandatory. Cold DMs on Instagram count. Hiding behind Google Forms doesn’t.
- Build the ugliest thing that works: MVP = Minimum Viable Product, not Most Beautiful Pixels.** If it’s pretty and nobody pays, you failed twice.
- Charge on day one: Even if it’s a dollar. Free = fake feedback. Money is the only vote that counts.
- Break and fix in public: Post the broken version, collect the hate, ship the patch an hour later. That’s how you learn speed.
- Tell the story louder than the code: Ten minutes of pitching beats ten hours of refactoring. Every Friday we do shark-tank in the living room. Losers do dishes.
That’s it.
Six rules, zero busywork, a ridiculous amount of real money changing hands by week eight.
Works every time.
How to Do It Without Screwing Up Their Childhood
Eight-year-olds don’t need a pitch decks. They need problems small enough to feel like playground games.
So we start stupid-simple. There’s a kid in my daughter’s third-grade class who hates tying shoes. Hates it. We spent one Saturday turning a $10 pair of dollar-store slippers into “glow-in-the-dark monster feet” with a couple of LEDs and an Arduino the size of a quarter. He wore them to school, every kid wanted a pair, parents started sliding him fives in the pickup line. By Christmas he had cleared almost four hundred bucks and learned more about supply chains than I knew at thirty.
Twelve-year-olds get a little more spice. They build actual web things—custom Fortnite stat trackers, homework planners that text your mom when you’re done, dumb meme generators that spit out TikTok-ready clips. We make them put a Gumroad link up the same day the thing kinda works. One girl made a notion template for tracking K-pop photocards and pulled two grand in six months. She still sucks at algebra, but her Stripe dashboard looks like a college fund.
The teenagers? We just get out of the way. They’re on Replit forking open-source stuff, slapping Stripe on it, running ads on TikTok before dinner. I’ve seen sixteen-year-olds pull five-figure months with AI voice cloners and Roblox gambling plugins (don’t judge, the money’s real). We do keep a lawyer on speed dial for the COPPA stuff, but mostly they figure it out faster than the adults do.
Point is, you scale the stakes with the age, not the complexity. The eight-year-old can run a tiny business out of a cardboard box. A seventeen-year-old can incorporate in Estonia while eating cereal. Same mindset, bigger sandbox.
And no, they don’t burn out. They light up. Because for the first time someone treated their code like it actually matters instead of another gold star on a worksheet.
