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XChange Financial Literacy

Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer

Grades 9–11

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The day XChange stopped being a project we believed in and became something strangers paid for, in front of me.

Low-cost one-on-one financial mentorship and short courses for students aged 14 to 22.

XChange started inside a youth business accelerator called Prequel. Five other teenagers and I, spread from North America to Vietnam, kept circling the same observation on a group call: financial literacy here is close to nonexistent, and almost nobody is teaching it. So we built the thing we wished had existed — mentorship and short courses priced for students rather than for adults. None of us were financial experts, so every piece of content went to a certified financial consultant before it went live. We understood exactly what getting it wrong would cost a group of teenagers asking to be taken seriously.

I secured a $15,000 equity-free investment from a panel of investors, venture capitalists, and founders, which paid for the platform and kept the courses cheap enough that price was never the deciding factor for a student.

We built partnerships with the official investment groups at Harvard and Yale. That came out of my co-founder Joyce sending more than 300 individually written cold emails to investment clubs at the top universities in the country — not a clever growth tactic, just weeks of unglamorous work that most people would have abandoned around email eighty.

I launched the web app at the TEDEd Conference in Vancouver in front of 800 participants, and ran a booth there teaching students and parents about the financial literacy gap. The platform has since matched more than fifty students with a mentor and reached thousands more through the short courses.

We extended the programming internationally through PotentialUEducation in the UK, and worked with three Vancouver organizations to grow local engagement by several thousand interactions.

XChange is where most of my hardest lessons came from. Six talented co-founders turned out to be too many. While the accelerator held us together it worked, but once that structure ended, alignment across six busy teenagers in different time zones fractured, and decisions that should have taken minutes took hours. I also learned, watching people buy at our TEDEd booth, that the customer was almost never the student. It was a parent who saw the platform and immediately thought of their own child. Both lessons shaped every team and product decision I have made since, at Horizon and at Finlo, and I would not trade either of them for a smoother first company.

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