Let me tell you about an eleven year old.

He built an iOS game. Used AI and an open source agent framework called OpenClaw to design it, build it, and get it ready for submission to the App Store. His parents helped him form his first LLC to publish it. They celebrated with a cake.

He is not a prodigy. He is not an exception. He is what is increasingly normal in households where the parents have spent years inside the technology and startup world and have a very clear-eyed view of what the next ten years are going to look like.

He is eleven. An LLC, a cake, eleven candles! Let that sink in.

The people I am talking about are not random. They are former Apple, Google, Facebook executives. Longtime founders. Venture capitalists who have been reading the future mostly correctly for years. Hosts of the most listened-to podcasts in the startup and innovation world. People embedded for decades in the tech, modern media, and VC ecosystems of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and Austin.

People like Brit Morin and Dave Morin. Jessica and Sam Lessin. Peter Diamandis. And dozens more I follow closely and several I speak with regularly.

What they share right now is not just that they use AI. It is what they are doing with their kids. They are not waiting for school districts to figure it out. They are not hoping a curriculum committee catches up sometime before 2027. They are handing their children Mac Minis. They are sitting with them while they build workflows in OpenClaw — an open source framework for personal AI agents that lets you create your own memory systems, your own automated processes, your own agent infrastructure running on your own machine doing real work. They are forming LLCs for their kids. Think about that.

At a recent AI conference, twelve and fourteen year olds from AI-forward schools were outpacing adult attendees in the sophistication of what they were presenting. This was not a surprise to the parents in the room. It was the plan.

This is not about manufacturing prodigies. This is a cohort of people who understand, at a practical level, what economic opportunity looks like in the next decade — and they are making sure their kids have a head start that no school system is going to hand them.

The most organized expression of this thinking is Alpha School, a private K through 12 network founded in Austin by Mackenzie Price. The model: two hours a day on core academics using AI-powered adaptive tools, the rest of the day on entrepreneurship, financial literacy, public speaking, and building real things. Students placing in the top two percent nationally. One kid raised three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in venture funding and built a mountain bike park. Another started researching epigenetics after her grandfather died of cancer.

Is it perfect? No. Tuition starts at forty thousand dollars a year. The data is largely self-reported. Critics have legitimate questions about scale and access.

But that is not the point. The point is that Alpha School represents a conversation that is happening — seriously, structurally, and at scale — in communities with forward-thinking ecosystems. Not a one-day workshop. Not a field trip. Not another PowerPoint presentation at the school district board meeting. A complete rethinking of what it means to prepare a child for the world that is actually coming.

I have been trying to rally organizations in this valley around AI education and workforce readiness for three years. I have had the conversations. I have been in the rooms. I have made the case.

When I hear local city council members still using the same talking points from two or three years ago about positioning the Coachella Valley as a leader in AI, I genuinely want to laugh out loud. But it's not funny at all. Because the distance between that conversation and what is actually happening in the world right now is so wide that the talking points themselves have become evidence of the problem.

This was never about competing with Silicon Valley. That was never the goal and never a realistic one. But there is a very real difference between not competing and falling so far behind that the gap becomes generational. Our kids are not being prepared for the AI era the way kids in tech-ecosystem households are being prepared for it.

That is not an opinion. It is what I have been watching happen in slow motion for three years.

And here's what our leaders don't seem to get. The consequences will not show up in a headline tomorrow. They will show up in ten years in workforce data, in economic mobility numbers, in which communities produced the builders and which ones produced the people still waiting for someone to explain what an agent is.

If someone in this valley is running an AI-forward program for kids — not a workshop, not a panel, something structural and sustained — I want to know about it. Reach out. I want to be wrong about this. Because from where I sit, the signal is not there.

Last Saturday I sat with roughly twenty-five teenagers from high schools across this valley at a Big Brothers Big Sisters event in Palm Desert. I wrote about what they told me. Go read it. But what it confirmed for me is this: these are not disengaged kids. They are thoughtful, perceptive, and already asking smart questions about agency and attention that most adults have not gotten around to yet.

But they are using AI to get through tonight's assignment because nobody in their lives has shown them it could be anything more than that.

Not their teachers. Not their parents. Not their city. Not their school district.

That is the gap.

And somewhere else entirely, an eleven year old just filed his LLC paperwork.

Sat Singh hosts SunshineFM daily from Rancho Mirage. He has been sounding this particular alarm for a while now. Still at it. Still not sorry.

If this resonates, pass it along to someone in the valley who would benefit. This is a community project — it grows the same way communities do, one conversation at a time.