Middle School Entrepreneur Grants

Anand Sanwal shares how he started the Formidable Fellowship to support young entrepreneurs.

"We're building a national network of schools of entrepreneurship. It takes a while to build physical schools, so my friend Raj and I started something called the Formidable Fellowship. We think Gen Z is probably going to be the most entrepreneurial generation, and we saw a lot of them out there.

So we started a nonprofit with $500K. We're giving thousand dollar grants to middle and high school entrepreneurs. We just had our first class with 23 grantees. Along the way, other awesome entrepreneurs - Dharmesh from HubSpot, Sean Griffey from Industry Dive, and a bunch of other folks have been contributors. So now we've got even more capital to give out to these young entrepreneurs.

We reached out to a lot of entrepreneurship teachers at schools as our primary way of finding candidates. We also used social media, and some parents found us on Twitter and LinkedIn. We got a few hundred applicants in our first go-around. Our qualification was that you had to have revenue - that was a hard filter. There's a lot of folks who have sort of a dream or they're starting something to burnish a college application, and we didn't want that. We wanted people who were actually building."