Formidable Fellowship
Anand, a successful entrepreneur who built CB Insights into a ~$100M revenue company, saw a gap in how young people were being trained to become entrepreneurs. He noticed that Gen Z was becoming the most entrepreneurial generation, yet traditional education wasn't capturing or supporting this energy. Rather than wait to build physical schools—a multi-year endeavor—he decided to create a minimum viable product to test the concept.
Anand partnered with his friend Raj to launch the Formidable Fellowship as a nonprofit with an initial $500K investment. The model was simple but elegant: give $1,000 grants to middle and high school students who had already proven they could generate revenue. This wasn't for dreamers or business plan competitions—it was for kids actually building and selling.
Their outreach strategy was grassroots. Anand and Raj reached out directly to entrepreneurship teachers at schools, leveraged social media (Twitter and LinkedIn), and relied on word-of-mouth from parents who discovered them online. Despite the initial uncertainty, they received "a few hundred applicants" in their first round. To filter for real builders, they implemented a hard requirement: applicants had to have revenue. This single criterion eliminated dreamers and app-padding college applicants, leaving only students genuinely building businesses.
The bet paid off. They accepted 23 grantees in their first cohort—real ninth, tenth, and eleventh graders running actual businesses generating tens of thousands of dollars in profit. The program attracted high-profile supporters: Mesh from HubSpot, Sean Griffey from IndustryDive, and other accomplished entrepreneurs became contributors. The success of that first class generated momentum; as Anand mentions, "other awesome entrepreneurs...have been contributors. So now we've got even more capital to give out to these young entrepreneurs."
Formidable Fellowship has evolved from a scrappy pilot into a credible alternative pipeline for identifying and supporting the next generation of founders. Anand's long-term vision remains ambitious: to build a national network of schools of entrepreneurship that could eventually rival the public school system. The nonprofit model with grant funding allows him to operate at scale without the overhead of traditional educational institutions, while the focus on revenue-generating businesses ensures only serious builders get supported.
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