What is the STARTEDUp Foundation and what kinds of programs align with their mission?

Q: What is the STARTEDUp Foundation and what kinds of programs align with their mission?

The STARTEDUp Foundation is a K-12 nonprofit focused on building entrepreneurial mindset and innovation capacity in schools. Programs that align with that mission share a few traits: students do the work instead of watching it modeled, the reps are short and repeatable, and the format doesn't require a semester-long curriculum overhaul to try once. Design challenges, pitch competitions, and live pitching labs like SideHustle Labs all fit that description because the students are the ones brainstorming, pitching, and being scored — not the teacher lecturing at them.

Running this with a class? SideHustle is free to play, needs no student accounts, and fits a class period. Get the game and the printable rules - we email you the link.

The story

K-12 schools have a growing appetite for what's loosely called "entrepreneurial mindset" work — the ability to generate an idea, defend it in front of skeptics, take feedback, and try again. The challenge foundations run into is that mindset doesn't come from a textbook. You can hand a student a chapter on "opportunity recognition," but the skill only shows up once they've actually stood up, pitched something half-formed, and watched a room react to it in real time.

That's why foundations focused on this space, including STARTEDUp, tend to gravitate toward formats that put students in the driver's seat: design challenges, pitch competitions, real-business projects, and short-form labs where the whole loop — idea, pitch, feedback, iterate — happens inside a single class period. The SideHustle Labs format was built around exactly that loop. It gives every student in the room a turn to brainstorm, pitch, get scored, and rotate roles, all inside one 60-to-90-minute session, run by the school's own teacher rather than an outside facilitator.

The signal that this category of format travels well doesn't come from a sales pitch — it comes from educators who found the underlying game on their own and ran with it. A Mars Hill University professor used the free SideHustle game with his class. A business teacher in Vigo County, Indiana stripped the same mechanic down to a shorter round and ran it with roughly 400 middle school students cycling through his classroom — no curriculum change, no long setup, just the pitch-and-score loop compressed into a few minutes per group. Neither of those was arranged by SideHustle; both were teachers who picked up the free version and adapted it to their own room. That's the kind of independent, cross-context adoption that tells you a format has legs beyond its original design.

The high school and university adaptation, SideHustle Labs, removes nothing essential from what those educators improvised on their own. It compresses time and tunes the prompts for a classroom block, but the mechanic is the same: random prompt, brief brainstorm, a team pitches, the room scores Funny and Fundable, then everyone rotates roles and does it again.

What foundations and schools are actually looking for

Strip away the branding and the ask from foundations like STARTEDUp is consistent: programming where students do the work, not where they watch someone else do it. That's a category, not a single vendor or product. A design challenge where teams build and defend a prototype fits. A pitch competition where student teams compete for judges' attention fits. A facilitated lab where teams brainstorm, pitch to peers, and get scored on the spot fits too.

What distinguishes the formats that actually stick in a school from the ones that get tried once and shelved is usually logistics, not ambition. Does it require an outside crew, or can the existing teacher run it? Does it fit inside a standard class period, or does it need a special event day? Can it flex from a 10-minute demo to a full 90-minute session depending on the schedule that week? Programs that answer "teacher can run it, fits the block, scales up or down" tend to be the ones a school actually repeats.

Why the pitching mechanic specifically works

Pitching isn't really a presentation skill — it's closer to an improvisation skill, and that distinction matters for how a program should be designed. You can teach a student to build slides. You cannot teach them, from slides, what it feels like to take an unscripted follow-up question in front of peers and answer it without notes. That muscle only shows up when preparation time is deliberately taken away and replaced with a short brainstorm window, a pitch, and real-time scoring from the room.

That's the observation SideHustle Labs was built around, and it's also why the Funny-and-Fundable scoring pairing matters more than it looks like on the surface. Scoring only on "good idea" invites students to play it safe. Scoring on both funny and fundable gives permission to swing at something ambitious — the room is going to laugh either way, so a student might as well pitch the real idea instead of the safe one.

What it means for a program-aligned foundation

If a foundation's stated mission is entrepreneurial mindset and innovation capacity, the programs worth funding or piloting are the ones where that mindset gets exercised, not described. A one-off assembly speaker builds enthusiasm for a day. A repeatable, teacher-run format that fits into an existing class block builds the muscle over a semester. The schools that move fastest tend to be the ones that pick a format, run it cold with the students they already have, and iterate from there rather than waiting for a perfect pilot plan. For the full method behind that approach, see the educator guide to teaching entrepreneurship through play, and for a closer look at the classroom format itself, see what is SideHustle Labs.

Try it

• Play free at playsidehustle.com
• See us live: Sept 25 at Pershing Hall in Austin. luma.com/playsidehustle

Bring SideHustle to your program

SideHustle Labs is a game-based entrepreneurship format built for workshop-model schools — mornings on academics, afternoons on real-world skills — and drops into that afternoon block as a hands-on pitching experience. Opt in to play free and see how it runs before scaling it across classrooms, or email team@playsidehustle.com to talk through a fit for your program.