by Alan Veeck
Founder Felix Lloyd used to be a school teacher in Washington DC, and he hopes his startup, Skill-Life, willl be able to help school-aged children learn about personal finances. He likens his idea to “SIMS meets Quicken.”
Felix is a great salesman, and his entertaining walk through the Skill-Life online virtual world, Cents City, showed off the fun nature of the experience that will be attractive to their young demographic. Like the other AlphaLab companies, he has created alot from a little in a short amount of time.
Skill-Life hopes to get the Cents City experience into schools as well as after-school and summer youth programs, utilizing foundation, community development, and government grants. This was a change from the initial model to sell to financial institutions, but both pathways have issues on the revenue generation/funding front. Eventually, the revenue model relies on entering the consumer market.
I also think that Skill-Life needs to be careful about building too much overtly educational content into what feels like a somewhat compelling game - there is no faster way to chase kids off than to push education at them…
CORRECTION: I earlier listed Todd Waits as a co-founder; Todd has been working with Skill-Life on a contract basis (and has done a pretty bang-up job, based on the look and feel of Cents City!).
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This is a great commentary on today’s presentation and the work we are doing at Skill-Life. Alan, of course, gives great insight into the success we have had thus far as well as the challenges ahead. Right now, we’re focused on leveraging our social impact to deliver our Beta to pilot users in education and youth enrichment before pushing toward the consumer market. It’s an exciting journey that has been made all the sweeter by being part of the first AlphaLab!