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All this time, I wondered how to get younger people more on top of their finances. Money liberated me. An immigrant. A first-generation graduate. An outsider. Young people have the advantage of time. And when it comes to good money habits and the potential of wealth, time is everything. How do we get them more ahead?

Nobody wants to read a textbook about money. Or be told how to save. Or sit through the 401k onboarding at their first job. Much less regulate credit card spending when friends on Instagram are balling out like there's no tomorrow. In many circles, money talk is taboo.

But you know what people care about? People. They pay attention to who they look up to. For some, it's inspiration. For others, it's envy. But this might be the way to get young people taking advantage of their greatest weapon; time.

The problem is, I was working against human nature. Our biases and behaviours are so deeply embedded that the idea of "expose all your financial data to friends and turn it into a social app" was too preposterous. Too uphill. So I joined a social startup building avatar companions and creation tools. I thought, "at least we can build a future of social that isn't camera-based, that doesn't skew the game to people who have money or symmetrical bone structure, that still enables expression and creativity and frankly, weirdness."

That's still useful, right?

It was a short stint. Lots of stuff happened. We launched. I quit. And then more stuff happened. Actually... a lot of things have happened since then. It's been quite a journey these last few years. But we still have to build. Together.