Formidable Fellowship

The Formidable Fellowship gives $1,000 grants to amazing middle and high school entrepreneurs in the USA. It was founded by successful entrepreneurs and investors who want to spark the next wave of young US entrepreneurs.

Co-Founder

CB Insights

Executive Chair & Co-Founder

We are building the largest, most trusted and vibrant technology marketplace in the world

We are hiring like crazy and looking for people with the 5 H's (hard working, humble, helpful, high standards and hungry)  

Check out openings or message me directly -- www.cbinsights.com/jobs

CEO and Co-Founder

Pratham USA

Pratham's mission is to educate the 100 million children in India who cannot read or write. They have an incredibly innovative model that uses technology and data to bring education to children all over India.  I'm privileged to be part of the NYC area Board.

Pratham's innovative and highly effective model was heavily featured and highlighted in the great book Poor Economics by Nobel Prize Winner Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee.

Board Member

Atlas Fine Chemicals - India

Atlas Fine Chemicals is a chemical manufacturing company started by my amazing Dad.  When he passed away suddenly in 2017, I ran it until it was acquired.

The Atlas team is incredible.

Managing Director

American Express

In my role at at American Express, I ran three groups simultaneously, specifically:

(1) Chairman's $50M Innovation Fund - Spearheaded effort that led to creation of a $50M fund whose goal was to to invest in disruptive opportunities that would extend and enhance AmEx's products, services and brand.

(2) American Express' Investment Optimization which managed the company's discretionary investment spend ($4-5B per annum).  The company's portfolio management efforts have received numerous awards and recognition from the likes of the CFO Executive Board, Baseline Magazine, Gartner, and CFO Magazine amongst other.  

(3) CFO's Strategic Planning and business analysis group - An internal strategy consulting group working on projects for the company's CFO

Vice President - Lead $50 Million Chairman's Innovation Fund

Kozmo.com

At Kozmo.com, I was part of a team of four selected to launch Kozmo Europe based in London.  This required raising venture capital, negotiating business development deals with potential distribution/retail partners and managing the operations of this start-up venture in London.  

Kozmo.com was an internet delivery & logistics company.  It remains one of the most well-funded and infamous startups in NYC history.

Strategic Planning and Growth

Atlas Industries

Worked with multinational company with locations in India, China and the USA to streamline operations, develop corporate strategy, understand and penetrate adjacent product markets and develop new geographic markets for company's existing products.

Strategy/Operations Consultant

I owe people money. Please buy a subscription to CB Insights.

900,000+ people read our newsletter.  It's free.  And if you don't like it, we'll give you your money back.

www.cbinsights.com/newsletter

"My daughter has a 4.0 GPA"

Unfortunately, it's worthless 

84% of high school grads now attending a 4 yr college had an A average

Yes, welcome to America
Where everyone is exceptional

What happened was simple: 

▪️ The township next door started inflating grades. 
▪️ So your school had to match. 
▪️ Then the township next door pumped their grades more
▪️ And your school outdid them

This was the logical end to this arms race where everyone "wins"

Colleges have awakened to this 

That's why they're looking elsewhere: portfolios, projects, outcomes that speak to actual capability. (btw, not fake non-profits)

Unfortunately, being a straight A student no longer means what it used to

Anand Sanwal

💩 Harvard knows its model is busted

And Harvard’s student paper just said the quiet part out loud.

Their own students now argue that Harvard is training people for a world that no longer exists.

It gets parts right and parts wrong. Here's my breakdown.

1. The article diagnoses the right symptoms

▪️ There's a gap b/w classroom theory and real capability
▪️ The most meaningful learning happens in clubs and side projects
▪️ Anxiety is up cuz students know they are being prepared for jobs that may not exist
▪️ The curriculum is detached from the world students are entering

All correct.

2. But the prescription is wrong
▪️ The fix is not turning school into job training
▪️ Education shouldn't chase whatever skills employers want this qtr
▪️ Deep thinking should not be replaced by prompt engineering.

Doing that is just as fragile. Don't educate based on hiring trends & hot markets.

3. What a great model looks like

▪️ It builds real human capability
▪️ Real work tied to real problems
▪️ Education that embeds relevance, impact & autonomy
▪️ Strong writing, communication, and reasoning.
▪️ Systems thinking and adaptability.
▪️ A portfolio of evidence, not seat time or inflated grades.

University education is and has been drifting. 
That part the article gets right.

But it shouldn't follow the job market.
It should develop people who can thrive in any market.

TBH, the ultimate goal of a Harvard education (or any university) being to funnel every student toward a job seems very narrow and frankly unambitious.

Education should widen the path. Not narrow it.

Build something. 
Lead something. 
Create something that did not exist before. 

And if they choose to work somewhere, that is success too. The end goal, however, should be that students have the confidence and agency to think bigger.

Founder of CB Insights | I owe people money. Please buy a subscription to CB Insights

If you have always felt you would be a great teacher, but the economics of traditional teaching never made sense for your life, I'd like you to reconsider.

We are hiring Guides who want to help students see their potential and push past it. And who help give students the education they deserve. 

This is not lecturing. 

It is coaching, motivating, designing challenges, and helping kids build real capability.

▪️ Compensation ranges from 100k to 200k, plus meaningful upside.
▪️ Small cohorts, building real things, no BS.
▪️ A model built for mastery, agency, and real proof of capability.

We are not building one school. 

We are building a network. 

Multiple campuses across NJ and then FL, TX, CA and beyond. 

The team you join now shapes the culture and the blueprint for every school that follows.

You DO NOT need decades of teaching experience. 

You need to learn fast, be a motivator of young people and be excited by the idea of being part of a school, a startup, and a movement.

If that sounds like you, send me a note.
my email is anand (at) forgeprep (dot) org

"I hate the Chromebooks!!!"

When we tell parents that School of Entrepreneuring students only use pen & paper when they're in seminar, I thought I'd get lots of questions or pushback

Instead, most tell me they hate laptops & chromebooks

Parents inherently know what the research says

▪️ Paper strengthens recall and retention
▪️ It forces actual thinking, not tab switching
▪️ It builds focus and stamina
▪️ It minimizes distraction (ever see the games students play?)

Funny that our schools filled with experts on education haven't figured this out or perhaps they're not incentivized to figure it out

NVIDIA isn't just selling chips. They're building & buying the entire stack.

▪️ $2B into Synopsys. 
▪️ 400+ new partnerships in 2025 alone (up 30%). 
▪️ 145 investments
▪️ 12 acquisitions

In just 24 months

This isn't diversification. It's consolidation.

NVIDIA controls the GPUs. Now they're controlling the design tools, the networking layer, the cloud fabric, and the edge deployment stack.

The question: Can anyone build AI infrastructure without NVIDIA anymore?

P.S. Strategy Maps showing how company strategy is moving are now interactive, live and real-time on CB Insights (see static image below). They are generated by our AI atop our business relationship data.

Nerd alert: A systems analysis of a school day

As we build The School of Entrepreneuring, we analyzed the school day schedule as a system

Here's what we saw:

▪️ Six periods.
▪️About 8 minutes to transition b/w them
▪️Another 7 minutes for attendance, paper shuffling, settling the one kid who is not in their seat, phone collection, etc.

That is roughly 15 minutes lost per class.

Across six transitions, that is 90 minutes gone.

In a six hour school day, 25% of the time has nothing to do with learning

The system was built to train compliant factory workers so having them move to the next station when a bell rings actually makes sense given their goals

But of course, we're not churning out assembly line drones

And so we've been thinking about how to redesign the day to get the waste out.

If you get that 25% out, it's like adding an additional year of education every 4 years just thru a better schedule (note: we can't take it down to zero but we're trying)

What's more interesting is what that extra time enables:

▪️Speed run academics: You want to take AP bio in 8th grade? Sure.
▪️Get an internship: Want to apprentice with a fashion designer? Let's do it
▪️Build your passion project: Want to break a Guiness book record or build a startup. LFG!

The extra time let's them accelerate and go deep

And for students who need extra support in a particular area, this creates time to do that

There are many structural, system-level improvement we're making to the school calendar in addition to this, but this is one of the big ones I'm excited about

I made up a word about 17 months ago

That word is "entrepreneuring"

When I describe our school as one focused on entrepreneuring, parents will sometimes say "my daughter/son is not a founder".

And I have to tell them that becoming a founder is not the point

Instead, I describe it as follows:

Entrepreneuring is instead a system of thinking and doing that anyone can develop. 

It’s a disciplined way of solving problems on behalf of others, by observing needs, generating ideas, testing solutions, and adapting quickly based on feedback.

It’s closer to engineering than to “entrepreneurship.” 

Where engineering applies structured thinking to physical systems, entrepreneuring applies structured thinking to human problems. Sometimes, even mundane problems which are often messy and always uncertain.

As our kids enter a future that is even more uncertain (thanks AI), the people who will thrive are those who have a nose for problems and an ability to solve them

Those people will be valuable in any environment: a large organization, a scientific lab, in government, or building their own venture

That is what entrepreneuring is

I can guarantee that skill is not acquired memorizing trivia and vomiting it back up on tests

Full essay in the comments

As always, tell me why you love it or hate it

It's very hard to start a school...
It's also very hard to kill a school

In business, great companies grow and bad ones die

That phenomenon doesn't really happen in education

I get why that is the case, BUT
I do think a bit more turnover would probably be a good thing for students

WDYT?

One of the coolest businesses we've been able to support with the Forge Prep Fellowship (we give $1000 grants to middle and high school entrepreneurs)

Abigail's business Spikey offers a quick and reliable way to detect common date rape drugs to ensure peace of mind during social outings

Amazing high school entrepreneur with a great mission 

Please spread the word about Spikey

Founder of Spikey │ Passionate about using film for good │ '25 Bank of America Student Leader │ MJB Scholar @ Vanderbilt │ Senior @ RHS

Grateful to receive a $1,000 Forge Fellowship grant for Spikey, bringing total funding to $52,000. 

Huge thanks to Forge Prep and its co-founders Nick Clawson,  Rajesh Shah and Anand Sanwal for seeing the potential in young founders.

If you're like me and are trying to bootstrap, I highly encourage you apply for the grant at https://forgeprep.org

Back to work

Open article: Forge Prep by forgeprep.org

Surprise: You owe $20 million

That's what happened to the Montclair, NJ school district.

So what's next?

The reality: once a school district starts declining like Montclair, reversing it is hard. 

Very, very, very hard.

In fact, based on similar situations in other districts, it takes a decade or two to recover.

Why?

▪️ Cuts drive families away = lower enrollment
▪️ Lower enrollment cuts state funding
▪️ Less funding forces more cuts

Rinse & repeat

The spiral begins. And it is nasty.

By the time these districts stabilize, today's kindergarteners have graduated.

No parent wants to sacrifice their own kid even if you want to support public education

I call it The School Erosion Cycle.

Montclair just entered it.
And it's a long, hard road to escape it.

Read the full case study, linked in the comments

Wealthy kids more likely to have ADHD accommodations

Accommodations which let you take longer for tests 

Hmmm

As always, incentives drive behavior

Does the School Teach Morality?

Earlier this year, a parent asked whether our school teaches morality and what we would do if a student wanted to work on something he considered “questionable.”

I asked for an example.

He said, “What if my daughter wanted to build a gambling or sports betting idea?”

It was a great question. 
At the time, I did not have a perfectly crisp answer. 

I knew a "no fly list" of bad ideas sounded terrible. 
But I didn't know what we would do.

Here is what we do not do

▪️ preach a moral code
▪️ dictate what is right or wrong aka "the no fly list"
▪️ project our beliefs onto students

There are good reasons for this. 

It is a slippery slope, adolescents resist dictates, and you do not build judgment by telling students what to think.

At the same time, I would not be proud of a school where students built extractive ideas instead of value add ones. 

So the real question was how might we nudge students toward better choices without moralizing.

To attain my Montessori adolescent teaching diploma, we had to do a research paper so I made this the topic of my research

As part of my research, I discovered this is called "others-oriented reasoning", 

It is the ability to make decisions by considering the impact on others, not only yourself.

And so I went to identify how we might foster others-oriented-reasoning in students.

I identified 8 strategies

For those interested in those, I've summarized my research and those strategies into the attached deck

In short:
We will not teach morality.
We will teach judgment.
And judgment comes from reasoning, not rules.

I'm sure we'll keep refining, but building a school where students pursue ambitious goals that are valuable to others feels like it should be central to our mission.

I'd love to hear your thoughts

taplio

Anand Sanwal's Linkedin Analytics

Anand Sanwal

Performance ScoreAnand Sanwal's LinkedIn Performance

Anand Sanwal's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

.css-6ytdur{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39, 43, 72, 1) 0%, rgba(33, 47, 183, 1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Anand Sanwal's Linkedin Analytics

Anand Sanwal

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Anand Sanwal's LinkedIn Performance

Anand Sanwal's Best Posts .css-1emoo84{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:400;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);}(last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Anand Sanwal's Linkedin Analytics

Performance ScoreAnand Sanwal's LinkedIn Performance

Anand Sanwal's Best Posts (last 30 days)