Turn friction into leverage.
This week's complaint: “You need experience to get hired, but AI is changing the work that used to give you experience.”
On Friday, September 25, Chase Rosen and Leo Fall will take the stage in Los Angeles to pitch LaunchBridge.ai as one of five Build with Gemini XPRIZE finalists. The judges include Cathie Wood, Palmer Luckey, Mark Pincus, Anousheh Ansari and Logan Kilpatrick.
LaunchBridge was built in 90 days by Chase, Leo and Carter Eckle, three students from Arlington, Virginia. Two are in college. Carter, my son, is still in high school.
The LaunchBridge.ai team, with Bryan Eckle.
In June, they began by calling Virginia small-business owners. They heard how paperwork could consume weeks or months before a founder started selling.
The students wanted to fix that. First, they had to do the work themselves.
Chase opened the bank account and registered the LLC and EIN. Carter built the website. Leo handled the AI coding.
The result is LaunchBridge.ai, a $350 service that helps a Virginia founder go from idea to an LLC, EIN, website, payment capability and initial launch package within 72 hours. The state fee is included.
A local woman used their service to launch a Pilates business. This was not a classroom simulation. Someone trusted three students with a real idea and asked them to help make it real.
That is more than a terrific result. It is a useful answer to the complaint.
The first rung is getting harder to reach
That is a nasty little loop: you need experience to get the work, while some of the work that created experience is changing underneath you.
The New York Fed reports that unemployment among recent college graduates remained about 5.6% through the second quarter of 2026. NACE reports that 10.5% of entry-level job postings now require AI skills. AI is not the only cause of a weak entry-level market; remote work, cautious hiring and employers' reduced willingness to train junior people also matter.
The causal debate is worth having. Students cannot wait for it to end.
When the first rung of the career ladder weakens, help students build a new rung.
What the students actually learned
I mentored the team and am involved with the company. That makes me biased, but I saw the work up close.
The important lesson was not that three students could ask AI to generate a business.
AI did not choose the problem, call customers, divide ownership, resolve every technical failure or decide what was safe and good enough to ship.
The students did.
Their first attempt to set up the company's email domain in Google did not work. It was not a dramatic failure. It was a real one. AI did not remove their responsibility for the result. They went back and tried again.
They learned to interview before building, turn a complaint into a paid offer, divide work according to strengths, protect customer information and use AI without surrendering judgment.
My proudest moment was not learning that they had made the Top 5.
It was hearing that the lesson had stuck. Leo told Arlington Magazine that building LaunchBridge “taught me a lot about how AI works in the real world. It's not straightforward. It's not some easy thing. But once you learn it, it's a tool you can use forever on any project you need, and it makes it so much easier.”
The lasting lesson was not a prompt trick. It was learning from failure instead of stopping at it. Building a real company gave them a place to learn that.
Arlington Magazine reported that the team had paying customers before the competition judging began. The students were not practicing entrepreneurship. They were doing it.
That distinction matters.
Stop teaching AI without stakes
AI literacy matters, but another generic workshop will not solve this problem.
Students do not primarily need more prompt tricks. They need a setting where AI is one tool inside accountable work.
The better questions are: What problem did they investigate? Who said it mattered? What did they build? What decisions remained human? What failed? Did anyone use, buy or reject the result?
That is how students learn the skills AI makes more valuable: judgment, initiative, communication, ownership, ethical boundaries and the ability to turn ambiguity into a result.
The move
Run a 90-day student builder sprint.
This is not limited to universities. A services firm, local business, nonprofit, economic-development group or experienced operator can sponsor one.
Recruit a small team around a real problem. Three people is enough. Require customer interviews before approving a build.
Define one paid outcome. Name who it helps, what changes, what “done” means and what someone will pay.
Set the boundary. Specify approved AI tools, prohibited data, human-review requirements and decisions the students must own.
Give them 90 days and a mentor, not a shadow CEO. The mentor asks hard questions, opens a few doors and protects the legal and ethical boundaries. The students make the decisions.
Require market evidence and a public defense. A customer, revenue, repeated use or a documented rejection matters more than demo-day applause. Make the team explain what worked, what failed, what AI did and what humans owned.
The goal is not for every student to become a founder.
The goal is for every student to leave with proof that they can use AI to create value under real constraints.
College still matters. So do internships and entry-level jobs. But when the old bridge from school to work is wobbling, waiting for someone else to repair it is not a career strategy.
Build another bridge.
Know a dean, a parent of a college student or a CEO who hires junior people? Forward this. One sponsor can get the first conversation moving.
Your turn
What real problem could a three-person student team attack inside your company or community over the next 90 days?
Reply with the problem. I will send back the one-page template with the first section filled in.
Get Comfortable Doing Hard Things
Be kind to yourself when your golf game is not.
This year was the 28th annual Old Bud Golf Cup with my longtime college buddies. My golf was not perfect. That was not the point.
Golf has a reliable way of exposing the distance between what you expected and what you actually brought to the course. The hard thing is not always fixing the swing. Sometimes it is refusing to let a bad shot, a bad hole or a bad round steal a good day with old friends.
The score matters. So does remembering why you showed up.
One Song Worth Hearing
My wife and I heard the Avett Brothers at Wolf Trap. There is a particular joy in hearing music you love with someone you love.
One Moment of Awe
Outside battle and breeding, male elephants form powerful bonds. In Amboseli, a group of bulls moves as one, supporting one another and raising a young orphan as family.
Giants, making room for one small life.