Future Founders: The Entrepreneurship Experience

What Will You Do?

• Identify a real problem and write a focused startup problem statement

• Interview or survey potential customers and build target personas

• Map competitors and complete a Lean Canvas business model

• Create a prototype or minimum viable product mock-up

• Calculate pricing, costs, margins, and a basic break-even model

• Build and deliver a Shark Tank-style investor pitch

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Validate a startup problem through customer and competitor research

• Build a Lean Canvas, prototype, and basic financial model

• Present and defend a concise investor pitch with evidence

Students will leave with a venture portfolio containing customer findings, a prototype, business and financial models, and a pitch deck, plus greater clarity about entrepreneurial study or careers.

Why Entrepreneurship Skills Matter

Entrepreneurship teaches students to treat an idea as a set of questions to investigate. Is the problem real for a defined group? What alternatives already exist? Can a solution be tested before a team spends heavily? Customer interviews and competitor research replace assumption with evidence.

A Lean Canvas helps students see how customers, value, costs, revenue, and delivery fit together. Prototyping makes feedback easier because people can react to something concrete. Financial modeling introduces the consequences of pricing and cost decisions, while pitching develops clarity under pressure. These skills support innovation in business, technology, health, social impact, and other fields where teams must build, test, and communicate new solutions.

This academy is for high school students who have completed 9th, 10th, 11th, or 12th grade and notice problems, imagine products or services, or want to understand what founders actually do after an idea appears. It fits interests in business, technology, design, marketing, finance, social impact, and innovation.

Students should be ready to interview people, share unfinished ideas, work through numbers, divide responsibilities, and revise a concept after direct feedback. The course is especially useful for students who want to test several entrepreneurial roles and learn whether they prefer customer research, product development, strategy, finance, branding, or pitching.

Based on students surveyed in Summer Discovery’s 2026 UCLA high school program.

UCLA gives high-school students the opportunity to explore an academic interest while experiencing university life in Los Angeles, a city where entertainment, technology, business, science, and culture constantly intersect. The campus has its own community and rhythm while connecting students to a wider environment built around creativity and new ideas.

Students learn alongside peers, navigate a large campus, and gain independence through everyday choices and responsibilities. Time outside class expands the experience through friendships, campus life, and opportunities to notice which subjects and settings hold their attention. For families, UCLA offers a valuable combination of substantive academics, personal growth, and clearer direction about what a student may want to study, experience more deeply, or pursue next.

Founders work with product designers, marketers, researchers, engineers, finance specialists, operators, and investors to move a venture forward. Early-stage teams often share these responsibilities, which means they must understand customers, make tradeoffs, and learn quickly from incomplete information.

Students experience that process in a small startup team. They move through discovery, strategy, prototype development, economics, and fundraising communication, then see how those pieces affect one another. The work can clarify whether they are most interested in finding problems, designing products, analyzing markets, shaping a brand, building financial plans, or telling the venture’s story to an audience.