To the NFTE and BUILD communities:
As the new school year is underway, our two organizations are becoming one. Our purpose in that work is unchanged, and it is ambitious: that every young person will learn how to start a business.
We enter the new year holding advantages few organizations in our field can claim:
- We will reach more than 350,000 students a year, in schools, communities, out-of-school programs, and online.
- Our educator training and research capabilities are among the strongest in the field.
- Our commitment to a young person runs for years, not a single semester.
- Most powerfully—most distinctively—we now stand in New York and Silicon Valley: the world’s largest financial capital and the global center of innovation, joined around one purpose. Nothing like that combination exists in our field.
Nearly forty years ago, when entrepreneurship was treated as a subject for graduate business schools rather than for teenagers, NFTE began teaching it in New York City classrooms. Twelve years later, BUILD began doing the same in East Palo Alto. Between us, we have spent 67 years naming and teaching capabilities like creativity, collaboration, adaptability, problem-solving, opportunity recognition, long before the labor market made their value obvious.
But we cannot rest on our laurels. AI is advancing faster than any technology in our lifetimes. It is no longer merely a tool; it is an entity inorganic, agentic, and autonomous entity, and it is transforming how young people learn, work, and create opportunity. Knowledge itself is becoming a commodity. And the entrepreneurial mindset must be built to prepare the next generation to thrive.
AI is the context. Young people are the subject. We must keep them at the center of our endeavor.
This spring and summer, NFTE regional showcases and BUILDFests put that conviction on display. In St. Louis and Chicago, in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, in Pittsburgh and Baltimore and the Bronx and Boston, students pitched ventures to panels of judges. NFTE winners earned their place at the U.S. National Youth Entrepreneurship Showcase in New York on November 18, where the top team will advance to compete against students from more than twenty countries on November 19.
Look at what they built. Malik Oladokun’s Helply, an AI platform connecting young people to community service. Team RebBudget, a financial planning app that helps customers save for big ticket items while managing every day expenses. Isla Hughes’s Nova Guide, an adaptive AI study co-pilot for students with executive function challenges. Brandon Garcia’s ProspectPath, giving overlooked athletes the structure and exposure to compete for college scholarships.
These young entrepreneurs are marshaling AI against the problems of their own communities at a speed no previous generation could have imagined. They are our vanguard, and they are emblems of the entrepreneurial mindset we intend every student we serve to carry.
The hardest problems of this era live in the gap between what school teaches and what the world asks. So our real work is to build the infrastructure of an entrepreneurial mind—NFTE’s entrepreneurial mindset joined to BUILD’s Spark Skills of communication, collaboration, problem solving, innovation, grit, and self-management—so that a young person can cross that gap and act wisely where no answer is given in advance. We will build it in every classroom we reach, in every community we serve, and beyond.
This work will not unfold in easy conditions. Public education budgets are under pressure, philanthropic support is contested, and organizations serving young people are consolidating or closing. We will not navigate that by waiting to see what others do. We will guide our innovations along a clear vector: they must serve young people, and they must serve the communities they come from.
That is the standard our family of brands will meet. BUILD is its first chapter, and the aim is systemic: to move entrepreneurship education from an optional elective toward a core part of how young people are prepared for their futures.
Neither of our organizations has ever accepted the boundaries our sector handed us. In 1987, we taught business ownership to young people the business world had written off. In 1999, BUILD began with four high school students who wanted to start a business and were at risk of leaving school, and with a mentor who bet that entrepreneurship would keep them there. This year, in a field that rewards institutions for competing, we chose to combine instead.
We will do it again, on our own terms.
In the age of autonomous machines, the organizations that keep young people at the center will define what comes next.
That organization will be ours.
Dr. J.D. LaRock
President and Chief Executive Officer