Most students can graduate high school having never once been asked to build a budget, read a credit report, or explain what compound interest actually does over twenty years. They'll have written essays about symbolism in novels they'll never reread and solved for x a thousand times, but the first real financial decision most people make — a student loan, a credit card, a first paycheck's worth of withholding — happens with zero classroom preparation for it.

This isn't a niche gap. It's structural. Personal finance sits at an awkward intersection: too practical for most math departments, too quantitative for most social studies departments, and rarely anyone's job to own. A handful of states mandate a standalone course. Most don't. Where it does get taught, it's often one unit wedged into a semester of something else, taught by someone without training in it, using materials that haven't been updated since before the average student's phone existed.

The cost of that gap doesn't show up immediately. It shows up later, quietly, in the form of debt taken on without understanding the terms, savings that never started because no one explained compounding early enough to make it feel urgent, and a general sense that money is something other people understand and you're supposed to figure out on your own. By the time it's obviously a problem, it's expensive to fix.

What convinced me this was worth building for, rather than just complaining about, was how solvable the actual delivery problem is. Students don't lack the ability to understand budgeting or investing — those aren't hard concepts. What's missing is the format: something interactive instead of a worksheet, something that simulates consequences instead of describing them, and someone their age explaining it instead of a textbook. A stock simulator where a bad decision costs fake money instead of real money teaches the lesson just as well, without the price of learning it live.

That's the premise behind ProfitQuest, which I built in high school to bring that kind of teaching into classrooms directly. It's also what led me to MoneyBot, a separate, funded platform doing the same thing at a bigger scale, where I later joined as a founding engineer.