Mountain View students become business mentors at Cubberley workshop

If you can’t beat the doomscroll, why not make students work for it? That was the thinking beyond Tasktime, a hypothetical product pitched by a group of middle school girls at an entrepreneurship workshop in Palo Alto on Aug. 7. 

These entrepreneurs-in-training learned to start with the problem: people are glued to their phones. Tasktime forces users to do homework problems to “earn” more time scrolling. 

Fifty girls – mostly middle schoolers from three Peninsula public school districts including Palo Alto Unified, Mountain View Whisman and Los Altos – participated in the free, week-long Impact for ALL workshop at the Cubberley Community Center from Aug. 3 to Aug. 7. 

The workshop was led by Ellie Hu, a 15-year-old rising sophomore at Gunn High School student who served as program director of the workshop. Five of her Gunn peers  – Luna, Olivia, Hope, Nainika and Autumn – served as volunteer mentors during the week. At the program’s request, the Weekly is only running partial names for some volunteers and participants, who are under age 18. 

Hu has an entrepreneurial streak of her own that she’s cultivated through several enterprises. She started a jewelry business in sixth grade, and she co-created a Harry Potter-themed business with her sister that sold wands and brooms at children’s fairs when she was younger. 

The business experience was impactful, Hu said, because it developed her confidence and speaking skills after moving from Hong Kong to the United States when she was 9. She’s had an interest in budgets, finance and business ever since. With Impact for ALL, she wanted to help younger girls develop entrepreneurship and leadership skills. The project was supported by the Think Fund, a local grant program for youth run by the city of Palo Alto. 

“Financial confidence and financial skills and entrepreneurial skills in general start from a really young age,” Hu said. “So middle schoolers are the perfect age to target for financial education.” 

Each day of the workshop, participants learned a different concept. The first day, Hu introduced the idea of entrepreneurship.  

“I define an entrepreneur as a problem-solver that is able to spot different unmet needs,” Hu said. “I also talked about how entrepreneurs are able to create innovation and value by turning ideas into something people would actually pay for or want.” 

Ashley Hu, a participant in the workshop and Ellie’s younger sister, said entrepreneurship is about thinking about problems and acting on them in a way that helps people. 

In subsequent days, participants learned to identify a problem and how to pitch, find a solution, create a product, and develop personal finance concepts and negotiation skills. 

The last day culminated in a showcase where seven groups presented an imagined product. In the pitch, each group presented the problem and a proposed solution, as well as the business model and financial framework of the company. The products spoke to the participants’ fluency in artificial intelligence and social media. 

Products presented during the showcase included Acorn, a product that aimed to turn “trash into treasure” by recycling plastic waste into clothing. MentorMap was an app that sought to address declining school test scores by mapping educational “mentors” who could provide accessible and affordable tutoring services. Joanne Kanampully, a member of the team, created an online advertisement for the product which featured numerous internet memes. 

SmartEats was another product that helps families make nutritious snacking decisions with an AI tool and meal tracker that scans the snacks in a fridge or pantry, assesses the nutritional value of snacks and provides advice on a meal plan or recipe. Most provocatively, SmartEats also featured a lock function on the fridge and pantry that aimed to prevent overconsumption of unhealthy food. 

“We thought about something that we all experienced, which is over-snacking,” said Camille Clifton, a participant in the workshop on the SmartEats team. “We wanted to create something that helped with that.” 

After each presentation, the teams answered questions from the audience. 

One participant asked the Tasktime team whether the product would only include social media apps, or would it include rabbit hole-prone websites like Wikipedia included, too? (Any app or website could be included, the team explained). Were there parental settings for the product? (Yes). 

How did Acorn, the plastic recycling product, get its name? The team explained that they had collected acorns throughout the week, and one of the acorns cracked open to reveal a caterpillar – which became the name and logo of the company, the young founders explained with a giggle. 

The budding entrepreneurs also seemed to possess sophisticated technical knowledge. “Would the product be an app or extension?” one participant asked of the Tasktime team. 

For Hu, an additional objective of the workshop was to promote gender equality. She noted that only about 2% of venture capital-funded businesses have all-women teams. 

“I think it’s really important just to show them that they can be an entrepreneur, that they can solve problems, they can create a solution,” she said. “They can really make an impact on the community around them, but also the rest of the world too.” 

For more information or inquiries about the workshop, contact Ellie Hu at impactforallstudio@gmail.com.