Your Kid Doesn’t Know the Value of Money.
Your kid wants stuff. So much stuff. Clothes, a new phone, another pair of airpods or a charging cable because they lost theirs, a new laptop, a new tablet, video games, fake money that costs real money to spend in video games, and the food, it never ends. It’s like they have no idea how much things cost, or how hard you have to work to get ANY of it. They seem much more focused on how unfair it is that they can’t have ALL of it.
If you ask your kid what kind of house they think they’ll live in when they’re an adult, or what kind of car they think they’ll drive, and you might be surprised by the answers. It’s Bugattis and beachfront mansions for everyone in the future, apparently. Were you this financially naïve at that age? You don’t want to crush their dreams, but is there a way to inject some reality and hard financial management and planning skills into their lives to serve them while they’re chasing their dreams?
Teenagers are at a point in life where they’re about to take on debt to have a car or a college education. They’re about to live on their own and learn how to budget their money. You might have learned how to do all of that the hard way, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only option for your kid.
Keith's Military Spouse Experience
Keith met his future wife at Cornell University while pursuing his MBA. Beth was in the Army reserves at the time serving as an Animal Care Specialist (68T) when they started dating. Beth got into the Health Professions Scholarship Program (HPSP) to cover her tuition to become a veterinarian in exchange for committing to active duty service as a Field Veterinary Service Officer, largely caring for the military’s working dogs.
Beth currently holds the rank of Captain and the two have been married for over three years. The experience for Keith, so far, has included a lot of moving. The medical nature of Beth’s skillset meant there were some stages ahead of getting to her first non-training command. In the past 4 years, Keith has lived in Ithaca, NY, Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, TX for a school, and Fort Moore in Georgia for a one-year FGYVE, before finally arriving at her first duty station in Washington DC.
75% of teenagers aren’t confident in their understanding of personal finance.
Perhaps not surprisingly, almost a quarter of Americans aged 18-29 have credit card debt over 90 days overdue. Financially illiterate teenagers lead to financially illiterate adults, or adults that have to learn the hard way and scrape and dig themselves out of debt.
Keith Liao is convinced there is a better way. He created Aedify to gamify financial literacy education for teenagers to create more fiscally responsible adults capable of achieving their financial goals.
Entrepreneurial Spirit
While today, Keith is on a mission to teach American teenagers financial literacy, his first business was inspired by his love of climbing. Cornell has a robust, 8,000-square-foot climbing gym available to students. While attending, he was able to take advantage of the gym as often as he liked. Unfortunately, the options in Ithaca, New York for non-students were nonexistent. Upon graduation, Keith decided to do what many entrepreneurs do when faced with a problem, solve it by launching a business.
While working as a consultant for the National Parks Service in November of 2020, Keith opened Cayuga Climbs. He found a space just five miles outside downtown Ithaca, New York in an industrial park that met his unique space requirements, and then he got some materials. Keith built his own climbing wall after getting engineers to approve the design for safety, drilling over 1,000 holes in plywood. The peg-board style modular wall design makes it possible to install and change out various holds to simulate a variety of rocky surfaces, ensuring the climbing experience stays fresh.
The business was a success, and Keith hired a general manager to handle the day-to-day operations. By the time his wife’s military career moved them out of Ithaca, Keith added nine part-time employees and figured out how to run the business remotely. But half a country away from his business, Keith felt the need to launch something new to occupy his time. Something that combined his passion for video games and economics. Aedify was the result.
Connecting With Bunker Labs
Video games are huge endeavors, and initially Keith thought he’d put together a pitch for his financial literacy game and seek investment. That way he could make the key hires to bring his vision to life. It quickly became clear that with all the time and effort it would take to attract investors at such an early stage, he could just return to his bootstrapping roots, scope the project way down, and build an MVP himself.
Keith knows the power of bootstrapping, hard-won knowledge from his experiences launching Cayuga Climbs. He brought that same energy to Aedify, managing the basic coding on his own thanks to some experience with Python. Things were moving forward, but as a military spouse and the constant moves that come with it, building a network was proving a challenge.
One day, while clicking around the internet, Keith found Bunker Labs on Instagram. He liked the idea of having a community he could connect with over shared background. He first participated in the Breaking Barriers in Entrepreneurship (BBiE) 23A AAPI cohort, and felt like he fit into the community right away.
In fact, Keith felt so at home, he signed up for our Veterans in Residence (ViR) program’s 23B virtual cohort right afterward. The virtual option meant he could fit the program in even while his family was undertaking a big PCS move to Georgia. Still, Keith made great friends during his time in both programs, and even met a teacher who is a veteran that helped him pilot an earlier curriculum-focused version of his game. When ViR ended, he volunteered to be a Bunker Labs Ambassador for Washington DC. Now he helps ensure others feel as welcome and heard as he did when he was new to the community, and helps point them toward solutions.
“Any time I reach out for help from the Bunker Labs community, no matter the platform, they’ve never let me down. I have a 100% success rate at getting on the road to an answer when I reach out to Bunker Labs, and I found that impressive right away.”
Bootstrapping a Video Game
One of the biggest milestones in video game development is releasing an alpha build, which is the first playable version of a game. These get released to a small, usually friendly test audience that can help expose bugs and give feedback. Keith and Aedify are on the cusp of putting out their alpha release of “A Spaceship For You”, their sci-fi themed financial literacy game.
While Keith has been able to bootstrap much of his game, there’s no escaping that realizing his vision is going to take some money. He’s been pursuing grant opportunities, and recently graduated from the 2024 Tiny 4.0 Fellowship in May, which comes with a $5,500 grant for businesses solving education challenges. He’s also been applying to other business, tech, and education accelerators to broaden his network and seek additional grant funding.
There is currently an alpha release of Keith’s game “A Spaceship For You” that you can play right now!
It's Your Time
Bunker Labs Veterans in Residence
Launching a business can feel like a monumental effort just to get that first sale, let alone grow. What would happen if you dedicated 10-weeks to focus on the fundamentals need to launch and move forward? What would happen if you joined a community of like-minded veteran and military spouse entrepreneurs also working to take the next big step to launch a business. Don’t wait another minute and get started below!
Breaking Barriers in Entrepreneurship
Breaking Barriers in Entrepreneurship is a virtual workshop series that facilitates business growth and support within AAPI, Black, Latinx, and female veteran and military spouse communities. The eight-week workshop is designed to create an immediate impact for early to growth-stage businesses by providing access to business tools, resources, capital opportunities, mentorship, and a stronger peer network!
Bunker Labs is Now Part of IVMF
As of January 2024, Bunker Labs is now a part of Syracuse University’s D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF). In addition to ongoing Bunker Labs programming, we’d encourage you to browse IVMF’s deep wealth of entrepreneurship programming, much of it available virtually or at locations across the country. Find the program to help your business take the next step today!