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Business meets fun and games- VC’s Non-profit brings Kids into ‘BIZWORLD’
Venture capitalist Tim Draper has invested more than $5 million in a new breed of entrepreneurs — those whose previous experience is in lemonade stands and dog walking.
By John Boudreau
Mercury News
Draper is the founder and key investor in a non-profit that provides educational games to teach children the basics about business. The games, which use the manufacture and sale of friendship bracelets to simulate a business, are distributed to young people from San Jose to Singapore.
Draper’s Redwood City BizWorld Foundation http://www.bizworld.org/ marries his twin passions: education and spreading entrepreneurship across the globe.
Draper has a track record of putting his own millions behind his educational ideas. He spent $23 million on an unsuccessful ballot initiative three years ago that would have revolutionized public education in California by allowing the state to offer tuition vouchers to students to attend private schools.
Speculation of a future political career has long swirled around the Republican-leaning Draper. Asked about this, the venture capitalist paused, then said the initiative drive had drained him of time and finances. For now, he said, he’ll focus on his business.
Meanwhile, his (relatively) more humble schoolroom effort — initially called Tim Draper’s BizWorld — has gradually taken hold. Through BizWorld, he aims to create more business-savvy societies, particularly in countries in which his firm seeks investment opportunities.
“You want to do good things and get them thinking about business and entrepreneurship so they will be accepting of local VCs,” Draper said.
Last year, nearly 20,000 young people participated in BizWorld programs. The first game has been used in more than 655 classes in the United States and 165 Bay Area schoolrooms.
With a $175,000 grant from Merrill Lynch, the foundation is now developing three more programs to teach personal finance to low-income youth.
BizWorld’s current game teaches the basics: Students learn about assets, liabilities and equity while they “manufacture,” “market” and “sell” friendship bracelets.
They learn about ethics: Get caught spying on a competitor and you’ll be docked a BizBuck. And the game, which comes with “stock” and corporate titles, requires teamwork.
“It’s like business,” Draper said. “You have all your egos involved.”
Draper, 44, believes his game is more than child’s play. In fact, it was a graduate school business game — not his formal education at Stanford and Harvard universities — that gave him the best insight into the world he would one day thrive in as a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
The BizWorld game is played in four two-hour segments. Students form “companies” that design the bracelets.
Once a group of East Palo Alto boys contemplated breaking off from the girls on their team — until they realized the girls were far more productive, creating 25 bracelets to their three, Draper recalled.
The game creates “contextual learning,” which helps people take hold of knowledge more effectively than simple memorization, observed Abbejean Kehler, an expert on economics education.
“I liked it the first time I saw it,” said Kehler, president of the Ohio Council on Economic Education. “It’s not overwhelming for the teacher to embrace. Sometimes we have things for kids that are over-produced — too many bells and whistles — and the message gets lost.”
Draper, who said he learns through experience, conceived of BizWorld 10 years ago after his third-grade daughter asked him, “What do you do at work? Where do you go?” Draper was puzzled. How, he wondered, do you explain what a venture capitalist does to an 8-year-old?
The Atherton resident decided to create a game, which he tested on his daughter’s class. He repeated the exercise two years later for his son’s third-grade class. Now, Draper wears a BizWorld bracelet, created by one of his children or another student, every day.
“It’s a ball,” said Bruce Finch, vice president of sales for Presosoft, a San Jose software company. He has taught six BizWorld classes as a volunteer, including one recently at Loyola School in Los Altos.
“Ladies and gentlemen, today is manufacturing day,” Finch announced to the Loyola sixth-graders.
He then directed the “vice presidents” of manufacturing to buy their supplies — colored string — for the friendship bracelets. The students had to decide whether to operate as a “job shop,” in which each young person makes a complete bracelet alone, or as an “assembly line,” in which each person specializes in one aspect of the process.
Nora Drew created a bracelet with speed and ease, and she said she learned about business terms such as “revenue.”
But some aspects of business she already understood. This is, after all, Silicon Valley.
As the 12-year-old explained, “I knew what a venture capitalist is.”
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