Investors of Tomorrow: What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

Are you smarter than a 5th grader? While this phrase has become a wildly popular game and game show, it is also an interesting segue into a recent post in The Business Insider.

Daniel Schultz, DFJ Gotham’s co-founder and managing director, set out to try and explain venture capital to his son’s 5th grade class. To accomplish his goal, Schultz created a presentation of stick figures and clip art to explain how someone might invest in an ice cream startup and make millions within a year.

Schultz’s fictional ice cream company and subsequent success has provided a fun way for students to understand what venture capital is (the one important element missing, of course, was the potential for loss). It’s also shredded lights on exactly why investing might appeal to a number of people.

What Does the Future Hold?

In his column, Mark Davis wrote, “Startups are the fresh blood in our economic system. From a macro-perspective new companies drive growth, create jobs and increase the overall standard of living. They are always the team to be rooting for. As a result, the fact that angels are helping to keep the pipeline of new companies full is important news – news that beats expectations.”

Given that angels play such an important role in our economic future, wouldn’t it be great if schools promote angel investing as a career option? Kids want to be pilots, doctors, and lawyers. Angel investors? Is it something that you do when you’re in heaven?

Investors of Tomorrow

Schultz’s presentation is a great example of how to turn a big boy’s subject into something fun and easy to understand. If kids are given the opportunity to learn the concept of angel investing the way they learn about curing people and representing clients in court, maybe more of them will make a cautious decision to become angel investors when they grow up.

Kids will learn the prerequisites for a typical successful angel: a stomach for risks, a small (preferably large) mountain of cash, and previous entrepreneurial experience backed with a strong rolodex to help portfolio companies succeed.

If they’re keen, great, strive for it. If they know early in the game they don’t have what it takes to be an angel investor, at the very least, there’ll be fewer fools in the future making investments in random startups and causing unnecessary stress and nightmares to themselves and to entrepreneurs.

While we aren’t likely to see any 5th graders at the next investors’ conference, the kids of today are the investors of tomorrow. Adding “angel investors” to the list of career options might not be a bad idea.

Just sayin’.