We have had so many since 2022, and every single one of them, I could not let go. In fact, I have had a few of them that have been with us for three years plus now. It is a perfect match for us.

The first one that jumps to mind is Leo Daniels. Leo came in because we had a product that we were working on with Stanford. It is a critical thinking simulator for kids aged three to eight. Leo said, I have got a lot of stories to tell, and if you need a content creator for stories that can turn into playgrounds for students to exercise their social emotional muscle, that is exactly me. We put him in charge of a team of five other SMASH and College Track scholars to co-create stories about handling emotions, teamwork and leadership, sustainability, financial literacy, mental and physical well-being, and growth mindset. He created our YouTube channel for hosting all of that content. He drove it to a thousand subscribers within the first year. We hit 4.4 million views and it was all Leo. So the person that we hired originally thinking he was going to write ten stories for us became our digital marketing manager now.

Brian Ayala is in our front end engineering team. He was interviewed by almost every single person in our company before we hired him because we have not hired an engineer that is in charge of releases and product builds that is not a full time employee to date. Everyone just said it does not feel like he is a college student. How he carries himself, how he is able to take a deep breath and answer with such poise. It comes across as he is probably 35 and has been in the industry for like five to ten years. He started out of his own initiative not just sending me an invoice to pay him, but sending me decisions that he made, highs and lows, asks in a succinct update every time. He is very good at succinctly answering executive questions. He manages really well all stakeholders. It is beyond just the work ethic. The talent is just a no brainer for SMASH scholars, but the social emotional maturity, the work readiness is what really stands out.

They are very much humble and ready to engage at the executive level. If you believe that a human being’s growth velocity is the number one indicator, then SMASH scholars have proven that. If this human being has come this far, that potential for that human being to continue progressing is really great. So it is not growth mindset, it is growth velocity that has been proven in SMASH scholars.