Richard wanted someone
to push back.

Richard started with a list of everything he had never done.

It was the middle of his junior year. Both of his grandparents had died within a few months of each other, and in the grief that followed, Richard kept asking himself what he had missed in life. So he wrote it down. When he read the list back, he noticed a pattern.

Around that time, his cousin sent him a LinkedIn post about LaunchLab, the six-week program where Bold Futures Academy students build a venture and pitch it at Demo Day. He didn't overthink it. "It's a shot," he remembers telling himself. "Let me just apply and see where it brings me. I just want to experience things."

Where OMNI started

Richard didn't arrive empty-handed. He had spent years in DECA, the high school business club where students compete in business role-plays and write long papers on ideas of their own. He felt confident on the financial side of business and was still exploring his creative and marketing side.

He also already had an idea. Earlier that year, he was on the tennis court when his friend Neil suffered a heat stroke. Richard saw it happen up close.

He went looking for something that could warn an athlete before it got that far. What he found were devices that report data about a workout after the fact, and expensive equipment that only big programs can afford.

Nothing built for a high school athlete would tell you it was time to stop. With his teacher's encouragement, he made that gap his DECA project and called it OMNI.

Ten minutes of pushback

When LaunchLab began, Richard thought he knew what he was building: a device that detects heat and exhaustion. Then a mentor started asking harder questions.

One question was how OMNI would account for what was going on in a person's life, since stress shows up in the body too. One warning level for everyone would miss that. Out of that conversation came one of OMNI's biggest changes. Instead of a single threshold, OMNI would learn each athlete's personal baseline from their first fifteen minutes of activity.

Then came another push. Different sports ask the body to move in different ways, so how would one device read all of them? That question took OMNI past tennis and toward guidance for many sports, and eventually toward a coach's dashboard and a team view. Richard also saw what the pushback protected him from. If OMNI only did one simple thing, he said, Apple could release a software update and fix the problem overnight. The harder questions gave him something a big company could not copy as easily.

Over the six weeks, OMNI became something he could hold, too. Richard built his first physical prototype for $28.62 in parts and worked with AP Statistics teachers to gather information from student athletes at four schools.

Why he asked for it

Plenty of young people dread feedback. Richard goes looking for it.

He has many people he can ask for an opinion, he said, but people who know you tend to soften what they really think. "They don't want to hurt somebody's feelings," he said. "So it's hard to see what ideas are actually true."

He doesn't remember a time when criticism felt threatening. He traces that to home. His parents are immigrants. His father came to the United States young and his mother came later, and Richard grew up in a close family, in a house with 23 people where someone was always home. His cousins found comfort in that house and in the family business. Richard always found himself thinking beyond it. Growing up around adults whose lives looked so different from his own taught him to hear disagreement as a different point of view, not an attack.

It is also part of why business drew him in. He loves numbers and accounting, and he loves the creative side.

Building a venture lets him put both into something he believes in.

A different kind of leader

His mentor was a stranger on day one, and she did not soften the feedback. Richard was grateful for that. He also asked about leadership, and one answer stayed with him: leadership is about being honest and consistent.

It changed how he sees his own role. He used to think leading meant being assertive and telling people what to do. He also admits there were times he stayed quiet because he was afraid of hurting someone's feelings.

Now he tries to keep the person and the idea separate.

He is putting that into practice this year as president of several clubs at his school, including a business honor society, a stocks club and the UNICEF chapter.

Demo Day

Demo Day landed in the middle of college application season. Richard built his slides right after the previous session so they wouldn't hang over his week, but he only found about ten minutes a day to practice. In DECA he was used to months of preparation for a single presentation. Here he had about a week.

Before he pitched, he sat down with his mentor one more time. She told him he was talking fast and that she could tell he was nervous. Together they changed the structure of his pitch, cut some pieces and added others, and he was able to slow down.

Then the room responded. People acknowledged the quality of his work and the potential they saw in what he had built. Richard is careful about how he describes that moment.

Hope, and what still feels hard

Ask Richard what he is hopeful about and he answers with something bigger than his venture. He thinks of President Snow in The Hunger Games, who warns that hope is the only thing stronger than fear. "Without hope, what do you have?" Richard said.

What he hopes for most is that people learn to talk to each other again. "Life is so polarized right now," he said. "I hope we can get back to a place where we can talk and understand each other's perspectives, instead of alienating each other and not even listening."

He saw a small version of that in LaunchLab, in mentors and classmates who traded honest feedback and looked for common ground. "If you're able to take feedback and give feedback," he said, "you're already engaging in the first step."

He is honest about what worries him. He calls uncertainty the new normal. He worries about job security as AI changes work, and about choosing the wrong major or investing in the wrong skills. One moment from a LaunchLab guest speaker session stayed with him. A classmate asked how you slow down and make sure you really understand things when everything moves so fast, and the speaker had to stop and think. Richard found that mind-boggling. To him, it showed the question went deeper than AI.

There is one thing he feels sure of. He believes creativity is one of the most human things there is, and that people can tell when real human ideas are behind something. Whatever comes next, that is what he wants to bring to it.

Passing it on

Richard holds himself to a simple rule. If he wants honest feedback from his friends, he has to give it too.

This fall, seven different classmates have asked him to read their college personal statements, and he is glad to do it.

He mentors younger DECA students who ask him which events to pick, because he remembers being the freshman trying to figure out business. He also helped his brother work out that business wasn't his path and that dentistry was.

After college, Richard hopes to lead a nonprofit or work in nonprofit marketing, where his creative side and his love of numbers both get used. He already does volunteer leadership work with a nonprofit in Philadelphia, and for three years he has worked on a program he created to help rural villages in Cambodia get their goods to city markets. Helping people, he said, gives him a sense of belonging.

What he would tell the next student

We asked Richard what he would tell a high school student thinking about LaunchLab, something we couldn't put on a flyer.

And then he came back to mentorship one more time.

What Richard’s story shows

Richard did not enter LaunchLab without ambition, ideas, or support, and BFA did not create those qualities for him. His story illustrates something more specific: what can happen when an existing young person's drive meets a structured place to test ideas, receive hard feedback, reflect on leadership, practice communicating, and build relationships with adults who are willing to stay engaged.

That is close to the future-readiness pathway BFA is trying to build: self-understanding, demonstrated capability, trusted relationships, clearer next steps, and eventually the confidence to become part of someone else's pathway too.

BFA'S MISSION IN PRACTICE Help young people know their strengths, exercise sound judgment, build and contribute with purpose, and have people alongside them as they navigate education, work, and life.