Lessons From Camp
Every week at Young Founder Co., we open with a story. Not a lecture on business fundamentals — a story about a real kid who built a real thing. In Week 4, one story got a bigger reaction than almost any other: Cory Nieves.
Cory was six years old, living with his mom in New Jersey, and tired of the bus ride to school. So he told his mom he wanted to buy her a car. Instead of asking for one, he decided to make the money himself.
He started with hot cocoa, sold outside a local restaurant on weekends. Then lemonade. Then cookies — and the cookies were the part that stuck. His oatmeal raisin recipe took almost a year to get right. Too hard, then too soft, then finally, after enough tries to lose count, right. That one detail — a six-year-old testing and re-testing a recipe for a full year — is usually the moment we watch a room of eight- and nine-year-olds go quiet.
What started as weekend hot cocoa is now Mr. Cory's Cookies, an all-natural cookie brand sold in stores across the U.S. Cory once got a surprise on The Ellen DeGeneres Show: a cheque and a car with his own logo on the side. He was six when it started. He's a teenager now, and the business is still going.
We don't tell this story to promise every camper a TV moment. We tell it because of the shape of it: a simple, ordinary idea — a cookie — that someone refused to abandon until it was good. No shortcut, no lucky break at the start. Just a kid who kept testing.
That's the same shape every camper's week follows. Choose a product. Test it. Get it wrong. Adjust. Get it a little less wrong. By the time Market Day arrives, what they're selling isn't the first version of their idea — it's the fifth or sixth, the one that survived enough failed attempts to actually work. Read about how that looked in practice in our recap of Young Boss Market Day 2026.
Watching a room of kids realize that a business most of them have probably tasted a cookie from started exactly the same way their week did — with someone testing something small until it worked — is one of the moments we build the whole camp around.
Entrepreneurship, for an eight-year-old, isn't about pitch decks or funding rounds. It's about noticing something ordinary — a cookie, a bracelet, a drawing — and asking, "What if I made this really well, and someone wanted to buy it?"
Cory Nieves is proof that question doesn't need to wait for adulthood. Neither does anyone at Young Founder Co.
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