Meeting with Josh Landy (Gifted Savings) and Johnny Rapp

Date: 2025-03-31 Participants: Gary Sheng, Josh Landy (Executive Director, Gifted Savings), Johnny Rapp Format: Video call Topics: Gifted Savings initiative, potential collaborations with Joe Liemandt/Alpha School, America 2.0 Summit, creative support

Summary

This meeting introduced Josh Landy's Gifted Savings program, which provides high school students with $1,000 investment portfolios and financial education. Josh shared the program's impact, current status (piloting in LA, expanding to Georgia and Ohio), and future plans. Gary discussed potential synergies with Joe Liemandt's education initiatives and invited Josh/Gifted Savings to the America 2.0 Summit. Johnny offered creative and design support for the Gifted Savings app and connected Josh with his network in Georgia.

Key Conversation Highlights

Introduction to Gifted Savings

Josh: My career has been made in the nonprofit sector. I'm one of the few people who chose to go to business school and then pivot back towards social impact from the nonprofit standpoint. The thing that has always excited me is bringing transformative change into the lives of young people. First, that was in the arts, primarily in theater. Then helping to lead a nonprofit bringing music education to schools through a hybrid learning platform teaching piano as part of the school day in about 400 schools nationwide. From there, I went to Experience Camps, supporting grieving kids who have experienced the death of a parent, or a sibling or a primary caregiver.

I was given the chance to come to Gifted Savings to figure out how we can help donors directly gift investments to high school students, to change their lives forever - to totally change their trajectory. And that's what we're doing now.

Our founder is Farhad Mohit. He was the founder and CEO of Bizrate and then Shopzilla and then Flipagram. He exited all three. Flipagram was sold to ByteDance, it's now TikTok. Farhad saw that there's point $6,000,000,000,000 worth of wealth held by 400 individuals in this country - equivalent to the bottom 65% of the population. He asked, "How can we use technology to make philanthropy simple, efficient, and rewarding to unlock all of that wealth that's currently sitting there largely doing nothing, and get it to the people who need it most?" That was the genesis of Gifted Savings.

The Problem & Solution

Josh: There are 17,000,000 high school students in this country. 9,000,000 of them are already living in poverty. That stat is staggering, and unacceptable given the wealth in this country. Of those 17,000,000 students, almost none have the chance to learn about investing.

Our solution is to open the door to opportunity by giving every student a thousand dollar investment portfolio and teaching them how to use it. If you give them the assets and the knowledge to start building wealth early, instead of waiting until their thirties when they first learn about a 401k, they can truly take charge of their financial future.

Program Impact

Josh: The students at Westbrook Academy, where we're running our class-wide pilot for the entire senior class, tell us that for students who never before talked about money with each other or with their families, they're now opening their app, seeing their portfolio tracker, and talking about it on the way to the cafeteria. When it's up, they're excited. When it's coming down, they're nervous - two of the most valuable first lessons about investing.

The one thing they all told us was that it's fundamentally changed the way they think about money. "I used to think of money as something to spend. I would get money, there was something I wanted, and I would spend it. Now instead, if I get money, I first think about how I can save it."

We're also giving them activities that help match investments to long-term goals. We say, "Think about what you want your future to be." For many of these students, that had stopped at "Is it college or not college?" Now they're thinking about starting their own business, owning a home someday, or traveling. We ask, "How long do you think it'll take to grow your gifted savings to get what you need to do that thing?"

One 17-year-old student said, "I think I'll hold on to my gifted savings for twenty-five years. That'll put me in my forties, at which point I think I will have a family and a job, and it's probably a good time to start thinking about putting a down payment on a home." This is a 17-year-old in South LA now able to envision that future.

Current Status & Future Plans

Josh: We're in the final few months of our first pilot at Westbrook Academy in South LA, a school funded by Russell Westbrook. I'm going to Georgia on Wednesday because we're expanding to an entire district next fall, as well as continuing at Westbrook in LA. We're also pivoting our adult program in Yellow Springs, Ohio to Yellow Springs High School. So we'll have Ohio, California, and Georgia.

The cool thing is our operating expenses are fully covered. So 100% of any gift from a donor goes straight to the kids, and they get the added benefit of the app and curriculum on top of it.

Five schools by this fall is our target. A conservative goal for next year would be 15 schools, then 50 schools the year after that. The app basically runs itself, so our operational overhead for adding new schools is very low.

Potential Collaborations

Gary: Joe Liemandt probably spends more individually on EdTech than basically anyone else. He understands that education is fundamentally broken and that tech can play a huge role - AI is essential in making hyper-personalized and effective learning. After about a quarter century of dominating business SaaS products, he decided to be a high school principal. A few years since he decided to do that, he now has results of taking median students into high-performing students. He's ready now that the model has proven itself to scale it, and he's looking to partner with anyone that can help with that. He's always looking for more good ideas like yours to add to the stack of what is the future of education.

Johnny: I would love to kind of step into the world of your app and then pitch you ideas. Me and my team use an app called Granola that records entire conversations and transcribes them. We can build out really cool ideas and then use AI to create the base idea, and then build it out in 3D and render it to make it look amazing. Sometimes we scan people so their whole body can appear as animated characters. I'm very passionate about that.

I'm also looking at how are people using AI to do real-time investment aligned with students' interests? Are they able to invest in their own ideas and things aligned with their interests, morals, values, and passions?

Josh: We're currently experimenting with how we can adjust our weekly lessons to make it more of a self-led, potentially AI-assisted learning journey, so students can ask an AI agent questions about their investments or get automated updates on why certain things in the world impacted their portfolio.

Gary: I think what would be really meta but amazing is teaching kids that movement building is also a profession - paying them if they successfully convince their principal to get this onboard. Movement building is a passion of mine, and I believe organizing people is going to be one of the most important timeless skills when AI hits as it's hitting right now. Making sure people recognize that their people skills are really valuable - it's intimately tied to financial literacy because "your network is your net worth." We rarely teach that to kids.

America 2.0 Summit

Gary: The thing I didn't mention, which is going to be my entire focus for a while, is putting together a massive billionaire July 4th event in Austin. There'll be a ton of people that always have a bunch of money they need to donate to places. I would love for some meaningful Good Party representation there. I think it makes sense for you to be there, for Farhad to be there, and then at least one representative from Good Party besides Farhad.

Josh: That would be either Victoria or Jack. That would be a blast. I'll be sure to give Farhad the heads up on it too.

Gary: It's going to be a pretty crazy list of people - Elon, Michael Dell, Eric Schmidt, Chris Williams, Naval Ravakant, Brian Armstrong, Jay Shetty...

Next Steps

• Josh to send Gary one-sheet/materials about Gifted Savings to share with Joe Liemandt
• Josh and Johnny to meet in NYC for app demo and creative discussion
• Johnny to connect Josh with Alex Dermer at Get Engaged for Georgia outreach
• Gary to facilitate potential America 2.0 Summit participation for Josh, Farhad, and others from Gifted Savings/Good Party