The 14 year old building an edtech startup in Europe
Kaon Krasniqi is a fourteen-year-old founder from Kosovo. Last week, he donned the founders stage at TechChill to discuss his startup journey with Dealroom’s Head of News, Andrii Degeler.
The Balkan teenager told Degeler he had been coding since he was seven years old. “I was always the curious kid who asked the teacher never-ending questions. I was always the kid who wanted to solve problems, not just sit in the classroom,” Krasniqi told the audience.
With a dream of “making people’s lives better” and wanting to be known as “the guy who changed education, 20 years from now,” Krasniqi told us he was really good at maths and had been programming in his bedroom when he decided to build an AI-powered operating system for schools, Mindloop.
“Some of my peers play football or watch movies in their free time. But all the free time that I have, because I love the journey and I’m not doing it just to build a startup, I use to build – weekends, after school, up until night,” he said.
Krasniqi had actually emailed TechChill the previous year, as a thirteen-year-old, to see if he could attend the conference; the email was displayed on the very stage he was sitting on a year later, as he told his story.
When asked if he always had the ambition to become an entrepreneur, he replied, “I believe if the goal, before having a great problem to solve, is just to be an entrepreneur, it’s wrong. It should come naturally. I didn’t say, ‘I want to start a company,’ but I had a problem around me, and I thought the best way to solve this problem was to create a company.”
The company
MindLoop is an AI-powered operating system for schools, built on top of existing LMS (learning management systems). The main focus is to create personalised content for each student, while keeping teachers in control. It claims to save teachers 10+ hours per week on lesson planning. The system should easily plug into the school’s existing curriculum.
MindLoop is currently in the pilot stage, and Krasniqi noted that some regions were slower to adopt the pilots due to regulations, particularly in Europe.
To date, he has not raised any capital and said he will consider that after the pilot stage to scale and build a team.
Going it alone
Krasniqi told us that his age limits his ability to join some startup programs and opportunities for founders, but he accepts that he can’t change that and is happy to bootstrap and build his company as a solo founder.
“What can’t a solo founder do these days? You have powerful tools, so you can just go out and build. Until the validation stage, I don’t believe you essentially need a co‑founder,” he said.
Do what you love
So how did his parents take it when he said he wanted to start his own company? His father is a professor of entrepreneurship, so naturally, you’d expect this conversation to go well.
“My parents were a bit surprised, of course, but they are supportive all the time in all the decisions I make and what career I want to pursue. That really helps me. They didn’t give any direct advice; they just said, ‘Do what you love,” she said.
If you are spending every waking hour outside of your school activities building a startup, then that's doing what you love, right?!
“It’s the impact – making people’s lives better. It’s a great feeling to see that your work is valued so much that it puts a smile on people’s faces. That’s why I believe every entrepreneur keeps going,” says Krasniqi.
To all the young readers out there - you don’t need to move to Kosovo to launch your company. Yes, the youngest-ever member of the Estonian Founder Society joined when he turned 18, but, for example, the Estonian student firm program is a great first step into entrepreneurship, and one can launch a mini version of a student firm in 7th to 9th grade, starting at age 13 or 14.