Entrepreneur Night At Google

Street-corner lemonade stands are sooo yesterday. So says Google, which hosted an Entrepreneur Night for 3-5th grade middle schoolers (girls only) on January 28th, and yes, there were cash bonuses involved.

Children are naturally curious and often quite inventive little people (Some are exceptionally tall for their quaint ages, but they’re not people. They’re oddities. Just kidding, kids.) The can eek out currency from a fully-grown sucker-of-an-adult faster than seasoned professionals can loyal customers, and their conniving ways seemed to work in their favor last last Sunday.

The panel of judges (who so happened to be a series of well-respected Silicon Valley names) of course played it easy on the 400 parents, teachers, and children present at Google HQ, but some were impressed by the kids’ shameless promotion of their youthful cuteness by marketing soaps and bath salts to “anyone who likes to… be clean,” and the One Stop Pet Shop, where the staff are passionate about pets and ask $8 and $3.50 for water bowls and dog treats, respectively.

Entrepreneur Night is one of the ingredients to making one of the courses available to Girls’ Middle School students a real-world success. Entrepreneur Night is part of the fun and is meant to nurture young minds and give them something cool and exciting to partake in at the Google Campus, but it’s still business and economics at the core.

Groups present their business plans to the lineup of judges that ranged from Diane Green of VMWare to investors from firms such as Bay Partners, Versant, and TA Associates. The girls’ objectives: To get $100-250 invested in themselves and their ideas, purchase the necessary items, and try to make a profit. When the month of May comes along, they’re required to liquidate, return the investment to the donors, and donate 5-20% of the profits to charities like Greenpeace and the SPCA. Sometimes they invest back in the Girls’ Middle School.

Teaching youngsters about finance and economics doesn’t seem like the norm, but when those lessons are paired well with those of ethics and good deeds, it’s a win-win. Youth, male or female, are impressionable, and if the impressions left in their minds are good ones, their futures – as well as the futures of those they encounter throughout life - will be that much better for having learned values like those taught in the year-long entrepreneurial course instituted by places like the Girls’ Middle School. The incentive of a visit to Google only adds to the appeal.

Of course, it is a rare feat for a child to master computer language and produce a virtual social network. So one can say this story has nothing at all to do with the mission here at Profy. But the experience provided to the students at Entrepreneur Night is one that can leave an impact and can lay the groundwork for more ventures, risk taking, and better creations and inventions in the years to come. And venture capital, however small, is still venture capital.