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Youngest in the Room: How I Built Two Companies Before Graduation

Author

Grade 11

Book cover

Eleven chapters on building two companies before graduating — written for students who are waiting to feel ready.

Most of what gets written about young founders is either a highlight reel or a warning, and neither is much use if you are sixteen and actually trying to start something. I wanted a book that told the truth about the middle: the months where nothing grows, the co-founder conversations that went badly, the ordinary discipline nobody photographs. The title is not a boast. Being the youngest in the room is mostly an exercise in deciding, repeatedly, that you are going to speak anyway.

Eleven chapters, written across a semester alongside school, Finlo, and Horizon — usually late, usually in short pieces, which is its own argument for the thesis of the book.

Published on Amazon Kindle so it costs almost nothing to read. It was never meant to be a product; I wanted the version of it I would have wanted at fourteen to be sitting somewhere findable.

The chapters that were hardest to write are the ones about XChange. Naming your own management mistakes in print, where the people involved can read them, is a different kind of accountability than saying them out loud once.

Writing forced me to name mistakes clearly instead of dressing them up as learning experiences before anyone had actually learned anything from them. I have since found that habit is more useful than almost anything else I picked up — it is the same instinct behind the biweekly updates I send my team.

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