Growing up feels a bit like you’re living in the Matrix. Your life is governed by a system of rules and controls that feel arbitrary, but you follow them anyway because you’re told to.
For teens, the action of doing is really precious. You complete tasks like homework and soccer practice, but you never really work outside of existing frameworks.
That’s why we exist. To create experiences where teens create new frameworks rather than work within them.
II.
There are a lot of teen entrepreneurship programs and business competitions out there.
Here’s how most of them go: you come up with a business idea, create a fancy pitch deck and business plan for it, and pitch to a panel of judges. Then you walk away with a big check and a line on your resume.
These types of programs are counterproductive. They reinforce the idea that teens need to become adults before actually doing anything of value.
Spark Teen started as a night market for teen founders in our hometown of Portland, OR. We thought, “what if we got a bunch of teens together, gave them some seed funding to start a business, and told them to come back months later and literally sell their product at our market?”
What we saw was incredible. Teens hustling, starting their own clothing lines, food carts, beauty shops. They made thousands of dollars in just one night and grew a whole lot more than they did at school.
III.
Diversity and inclusion is built into our DNA, from our roots in Portland to where we are now.
Great founders come from diverse backgrounds, but resources and opportunity are disproportionately concentrated. We reach out to underrepresented communities because we know there are just as many great founders, they just may not be as visible.
