Shooting Stars Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on empowering youths through education, conducted its Youth Entrepreneur Camp in Silicon Valley, Jan. 3-5.

A group of 30 students from various local high schools participated in the three-day camp, resulting in six teams delivering 15-minute startup pitches and Q&A, in front of a panel of professional judges and parents.

The camp was organized and managed by high school senior students, who themselves were participants of prior years’ Youth Entrepreneur Camps.

Startups and independent businesses are the genesis of the U.S. and world economy

and often fuel a country’s GDP growth. Today’s world-renowned companies were yesterday’s startups, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft. As we enter the age of autonomics and robots, entrepreneurial thinking that drives continuous creativity and innovation will become the differentiating characteristics of tomorrow’s hyper-competitive workplace.

Shooting Stars Foundation’s Nebula Youth Camp has taken a unique, future-centric, approach to empowering the youth — through business and entrepreneur-oriented education. They have also recognized that learning is more impactful through success stories of other entrepreneurs as well as peer youths. The Nebula Youth Camp (NYC) is purposely structured to partner with local startup and business leaders and is organized by youth participants. The Foundation also organizes Hackathon and STEAM-A-Thon events to highlight the need for coding skills and technical education when forming startup businesses. These events have been held across ten cities in the US.

The Foundation’s broader mission is to spread the message of upward socioeconomic mobility through entrepreneurship to under-privileged communities.

Youth Entrepreneur Camp, January 2020

The three-day camp was held at ServiceNow, Santa Clara, and included on-site visits to local high-tech companies, Google and NetScout. The camp was organized by two upper class high school students who are alumnis of earlier NYC, under the guidance and supervision of Foundation staff. Both the youth organizers — Arvind Jayaraman, an 11th grader at Mission San Jose High School and Anirudh Ramasubramanian, also an 11th grader at Irvington High School — gained real-world leadership experience, which is critical for entrepreneurs as well as advantageous for highly competitive college admissions.

 

Seven business leaders spoke on different aspects of entrepreneurship and on creating and nurturing startup businesses (list is provided below). These presentations helped the student campers get a real-world view of how ideations turn into profitable business outcomes and what it takes to run a successful organization.

Thirty student campers, ages 12 to 15, were then grouped into six “founding” teams. Each student “founder” was encouraged to come up with a business or a product idea before coming to the camp. The founding teams learned to collaborate with peers during the ideation process — they debated each other’s ideas, brainstormed new ideas and arrived at a team consensus. Then each team began to form their startup plan.

Both the youth organizers and Foundation supervisors provided one-on-one assistance to startup teams, providing further insight and guidance to get to the presentation stage.

On the third day, the teams built their presentations which included: startup name and brand, its team and mission, the problem statement and proposed solution, market size, pricing and packaging, go to market options and competition. Their presentations were built leveraging materials from the professional speakers, hands on workshops, as well as the company tours they had taken. Finally, each team pitched their startup idea and business plan to a panel of three judges as well as the parents. Awards were given under the categories of Best Pitch, Best Innovative Idea and Best Business Plan.

“I cannot believe the participants put these pitches together in 3 days!” – Judge – Karthik Chandhramoulie, Marketing Manager, Google

“The amazing pitches just goes to attest Shooting Stars ability to kindle young entrepreneurial spirit!” – Judge – Kevin Lee, VP Analytics, JP Morgan Chase

“It was great to see brilliant minds of the future in action.” – Speaker – Preethy Padmanabhan, VP of Product Marketing, Panzura

“This camp gave an opportunity to students to think and build on topics that otherwise is rare as well as to learn from the leaders. Altogether, this is the best way to kindle the idea of entrepreneurship in these young minds early on.” – Parent – Sachendra Shetty, Senior Network Engineer and Tech lead at Google Inc.

“Best part was interactive lectures, workshops and exciting tours.”Sharadha Mahesh (10th grade, Fremont High School, Sunnyvale, CA) – Participant

On-site Visits in Silicon Valley

  • Google Cloud, Sunnyvale, CA
  • NetScout, San Jose, CA
  • Presentations by Silicon Valley business leaders
  • Google’s innovation and Importance of Developing Business Ideas, Karthik
  • Chandhramoulie, Marketing manager at Google
  • Operating a Large Company, Michael Szabados, Chief Operating Officer at
  • NetScout
  • Business Development, Michael Segal, AVP, Strategic Marketing
  • Developing Software in an Engineering Organization, Sharadaa Srinivasan, AVP
  • of Engineering
  • Idea Generation, Baskar Jayaraman, Co-Founder of DxContinuum
  • Fundraising, Sanket Agarwal, Engineering Manager at Postmates
  • Risk Assessment, Amit Saxena, Co-Founder of Eventley
  • Marketing 101 for Entrepreneurs, Preethy Padmanabhan, VP of Product
  • Marketing at Panzura
  • How to pitch successfully – Donald Steiny, Principal at Donald Steiny Coaching
  • Startup Ideas
  • Ly: App to connect tutors with tutees
  • Bay Beats: App to share music beats
  • Marine Protect: Robots to cleanup oil spills
  • Featherweight: Eco-friendly Backpack from reusable material
  • FreshAppetite: App to help make healthy food choices
  • Heart Watch: Watch with heart attack monitor

Additional Resources

Youth Programs: https://www.nebulayouthcamps.org/programs

Events: https://shooting-stars-foundation.org/our-model-programs