Founder's Message: Welcome Letter

In 2016, thirty students walked into a borrowed boardroom at Credit Suisse in Hong Kong. Most of them had never met an entrepreneur. None of them had built anything. By the end of that weekend, every one of them had pitched a business they had created from nothing.

These kids were enthralled by the founders we had in the room. Something unlocked in their minds: they could be anything and do anything they wanted; they just needed to believe it. That weekend taught me the lesson that has guided Young Founders School for ten years: talent is everywhere; opportunity is not. The students were never the constraint. Access was.

Ten years later, I want to tell you what happened to the money that people in rooms like this one gave us. A sponsorship cheque in 2016 paid for a weekend bootcamp: pizza, Diet Coke and a lot of snacks. That bootcamp proved the model. The model justified our first hires in Hong Kong. And today, ten years on, we reach more students in a single month than we did in our first five years combined. Money that once bought pizza ended up building a system.

Your support will put our programmes in front of 50,000 students across Asia and Africa this year and provide 1,500 life-changing internships to students whom others may have written off. It is your generosity that will build the ladder they will climb.

Today, we are setting out our next ambition: to reach one million students in the next decade. Until now, the ceiling on our growth has been simple: quality teaching costs money, and that cost increases with every student we add. AI has changed that arithmetic. For the first time, a student in a village in Punjab can access the same quality of mentorship and feedback as a student in a Hong Kong boardroom, at a fraction of the cost. Through our partnership model, it now costs us just five dollars to teach one student. The table you are sitting at tonight has paid for 1,000 students.

The technology that many fear will take jobs from the next generation is the same technology that can teach them to create their own future. These students have always had the fire. Tonight, you will pay for the match. And with the help of AI, we can strike that match in a million places at once.

The first decade's letter was written by the people who backed thirty teenagers on a hunch. Tonight decides who writes the letter we read in 2036, and what number is in it. One million students is not a moonshot. It is a maths problem, and everyone in this ballroom is part of the answer.

Thank you for the first decade. It has been an honour and a privilege. Now, let's light that fire.