Raising Future Leaders & Changemakers

First of all, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it. And it's just nice to see you again. I think the last time was right after TEDxKlagenfurt, 2017, 18, I don't even remember. So nice to see you again. 2019, was it? Okay, not that long ago.

I'm the co-founder and Chief Buzz Creator at Moonshot Pirates, which is a movement that empowers young people to think big, to succeed on their own terms while creating a positive impact in the world.

About me: I'm originally from the Czech Republic, but I've been living all around since I was 14, 15, and currently I live and work in beautiful Vienna, Austria.

Before I started Moonshot Pirates, I worked mostly in the events and marketing industry, for different kinds of organizations, from corporates to SMEs to nonprofits and NGOs. I have basically been leading teams organizing and marketing events globally, ranging from corporate conferences and exhibitions to TEDx events, which is where we met, to hackathons for young people.

Now, as Chief Buzz Creator, or let's say CMO, we use these fancy titles, right? At Moonshot Pirates, I am responsible for driving growth across all of our programs and channels: basically the branding part, the communication part and marketing. And of course I'm always there to make sure that we stay true to our values as a company while we grow and innovate.

And what we do with Moonshot Pirates: we are a global education initiative working with young people between 14 and 19. With our programs, we are focusing on the future job market, basically helping young people to learn the skills of tomorrow, to learn entrepreneurial skills such as creative thinking, complex problem solving, creativity and so on. But not only these kinds of skills: we also focus more on personal growth and on [their] vision.

So basically the different programs that we run with Moonshot Pirates allow young people to experience the life of an entrepreneur and changemaker for the very first time. As an organization, our main goal, our main vision, is to change the way young people grow up in our world, personally and professionally. And we want to do that by providing the most advanced, but also inspiring solutions globally for empowering young minds to become the future leaders and changemakers our world needs.

Why I do what I do: I'm asking myself the same question every day now. I think there are basically two sides to that. There is the personal side of it, and then there is the more common sense side of it.

So the personal side: honestly, I've never felt more alive than I do now. Of course, being an entrepreneur, we both know it, steering through the global community is not always easy. But I have to say that when I see the impact we make on the lives of young people, when I hear all the feedback from them, how they grow throughout our programs, what they've learned, it really gives me energy every day.

I just really sincerely believe that each and every one of us has what it takes to make a difference. And the only thing we need is to dream big, to find out what we are good at, what we are passionate about as individuals, and then of course not be afraid to just move forward, to take action in life.

I think we started Moonshot Pirates three years ago, or two and a half years ago, something like that, when the idea was born. Since then we have worked with around 4,000 young people. And actually last week we reached quite a cool milestone: we reached a pirate, so a young person, from the hundredth country in our community.

If I think about it: in 2019, Moonshot Pirates was at the very, very beginning. We started with a so-called bootcamp, as we call it, which is a three-day event where 30 young people come together, meet with mentors and work on their ideas. And that was in Tainach, which is a small village in Carinthia. And now, if I look at it, we have a global community, we are running programs [globally], and it's absolutely incredible. Also the number of mentors that are coming into the game to support the young changemakers. It's really crazy to think what happened in the past months.

So the personal side for me is: it's amazing to see that I have perhaps contributed to the life of a young person, helped them figure out what their strengths are, what their passions are, helped them gain confidence, for instance, and really, truly express who they are. That's absolutely one.

And then the common sense reason why we do what we do with Moonshot Pirates: we are currently experiencing a severe change in how we lead our lives, how we work, and especially in our understanding of work. One day I work from Vienna, the other day I work from Bali, hopefully, or wherever. This was not imaginable for my parents, for instance. Also the way we shape our daily routines: it's not nine-to-five jobs anymore, right? Our tasks are changing, and the substance of the job is simply changing dramatically.

Actually, I think there was a quote from Peter Diamandis, who is a co-founder of Singularity University and founder of XPRIZE. He said something like: right now we are living in incredible times, and the only constant is change, and the rate of change is increasing every day. And that is so true. Life will never be as slow as it is today.

So no matter what career the young people will ultimately choose to pursue, what kind of path they will go, they will often need to adapt and innovate. With such an accelerating change in our world, if we think of the job market today, many of the jobs that are here today won't exist in a couple of years, right?

There was a study done by, I think it was the World Economic Forum, and they said that by 2030, 2 billion jobs will be gone. That means that, I think, two thirds of the current young people who are in high schools now, in primary schools, will most likely end up following careers and doing tasks that don't even exist yet.

So these kinds of circumstances, if you think about it, create extreme uncertainty for young people. But also, and I hope that everybody sees this, whenever there is a challenge, there is also an opportunity, right? So this also creates an enormous potential for those who are ready to learn, for those who are ready to embrace new skills, such as creativity, critical thinking, leadership or problem solving.

And if I look at myself as an entrepreneur, I truly believe that these kinds of skills that I just mentioned are acquired by entrepreneurs in a natural way, right? By taking action and solving problems on a daily and hourly basis, by executing their own ideas, by working in teams with different kinds of people, and hopefully also by creating solutions for the challenges that are out there. I really believe that everybody can gain those skills in a natural way.

So again, sorry, long story short, why I do what I do: I simply want to look back at my life at some point and see that I contributed to our society in a positive way, that I did not waste my life on things that are not important, on pursuing a career that doesn't fulfill me and doesn't contribute to society in a positive way.

Yes, in every challenge there is an opportunity, right? We had just had two events in the past, as we were on a roll. Because with the bootcamp, what we were trying to do is similar to what TED is doing, giving licenses to TEDx organizers. Our plan was the same: to give licenses to external organizers to organize their bootcamps in their areas. So everything was basically offline. And when the pandemic hit, we were like: okay, are we screwed or not?

So we decided to switch completely online for the time being, and it helped us enormously. I think it's really bad to say, because I know that for many people and many companies the pandemic unfortunately wasn't very good. But for us: we wouldn't be as global as we are now if the pandemic had not hit us, if we had not been forced to switch our programs online.

So immediately, basically, I think, I don't know, maybe it was Monday when they announced there was going to be this huge lockdown, and on Thursday we launched our first webinar series. So it was super quick. It was watched, I think, over 10,000 times.

We launched the Moonshot Pirates Challenge, which is basically like our bootcamp, but it's for three weeks and everything is online. Young people from all around the world come together to work on global challenges. Right now we are running the second challenge, and we have around 800 participants from 80 countries, which is also a challenge, to run such a global community with such diversity. But it allowed us to think beyond Austria, beyond the borders, and simply open it up.

We launched a digital community that helps us connect the mentors and pirates from all around the world, and helps us give them the right content on a daily basis. And I think for us it was good, because we were still a rather small team. When the pandemic hit, we were three. Now we are 12. We have grown during the pandemic, which usually doesn't happen, people were rather laying their staff off. So I have to be grateful for what happened with us. We worked it out, we saw the opportunity in it.

Oh yeah, we were planning a big festival. So the good thing was, right at that moment we basically hadn't spent any money yet. But yeah, we were very lucky.

I'm pretty sure there are many, if I think of them. [One is] something that is in correlation with Moonshot Pirates. When I was young, I was the classical example of a good student. I believed that I needed to get all A's in order to pass all the exams, in order to go to a good university, in order to get a great job, earn tons of money, be successful, and so on and so on and so on, right?

It kind of happened that way. I had it fairly easy in my studies, and I got a job right after university. I was 27, I was working for a company, and at that time I realized that something was missing for me. Something wasn't feeling right. I was like: holy crap, am I going to do this for the rest of my life?

And at that time, back to TEDx, I was also part of TEDxKlagenfurt, where I was leading the branding team. Being part of that community, I met so many amazing people who worked on extraordinary things, crazy things, really out-of-this-world things, things with purpose, most importantly.

There were many power women that I met, who presented on the stage. There was a 19-year-old girl who was training to become an astronaut and one of the first people to go to Mars. There was a woman who was building the next generation of human-machine interfaces. There was a girl who had traveled to basically every country in the world. And so many others, not only women.

And for me, seeing them, sitting there and watching every talk, I was like: holy crap, the spark that they had in their eyes when they were presenting their ideas. This is something that I was missing for myself. And I simply was asking myself: what happened, right? What happened to me that I'm here, and I'm just watching those incredible women, and then I go back to my work, where I'm not content with what I'm doing?

And basically that was also the moment when I decided to quit my job and actually start working on something that makes me feel more alive, that contributes to society in a positive way. I was 27 back then. It took me 27 years to figure out what I am good at, what I am passionate about. As you said, you can hear the passion in my voice.

So together with my co-founder and also life partner, Marc, after the TEDx event, we were sitting down and thinking: what if we had this approach that we have now, being in the TEDx environment, where we were surrounded by amazing, incredible people, where we got insights into entrepreneurship, into new innovations and the social sciences? What if we had had this at a young age? What would have happened if we had had this back in high school or primary school? What would have happened if we had asked ourselves: what are we passionate about?

That's basically where the idea of Moonshot Pirates was born: to help young people find that spark in their eye, to think big and to simply succeed on their own terms, while creating a positive impact in the world. That's basically, I think, one of the turning points in my life.

Yes, 14 to 19.

So basically there are three main topics that we're focusing on. The first topic is moonshot thinking. That's also where our name comes from, right? So it's all about looking at yourself. What are your big visions for life? What are your big goals? Try out things. Don't be afraid of failure. That's one of the things that school, for instance, unfortunately is not allowing: failure, and learning from failure.

The second topic: we give young people an understanding of where the world is developing in terms of new technologies, exponential technologies such as AI, blockchain, robotics, 3D printing and so on. It's not necessarily important that you become an expert in those technologies, but you do need to know what's coming, in order to be prepared for it.

Now that you've learned about yourself and about the technologies that are upcoming, what we believe is also important, since we are not alone in this world, is to look at the challenges our world is currently facing: from the pandemic we are in right now, to global warming, poverty, the political situation, education, you name it. We believe that young people are the ones who can actually start working on solutions to those challenges.

So now comes the third topic, which is entrepreneurship, in the sense of: let's take action, let's create solutions to those challenges. So in most of our programs, we give young people the space to do that. We run all of our programs outside of school, either on-site or online. And we give them the space, the tools and the network of people to start working on their own challenges. And by taking action, you learn those skills that you will need in the future.

We always bring in experts from the industry. Whether it is the online challenge we're running or the bootcamps, there are always experts from finance, from branding, from technology, coding and so on, from the social sciences, who are there to support the young people, and to support them at eye level. This is very important for us. We want the young people to feel that they are the superstars in our program. They have the responsibility, they are now the entrepreneurs. We give them the chance, but they also need to take action.

And it's crazy, especially now, what we see working with this global community: how they crave rules, how they crave guidelines. Okay, I need to have everything written down, every step I need to do. But when you leave school, there won't be any guidelines for your life. Now it's time to figure it out yourself. It's really interesting to see how some of the young people react to it. But once they go through our programs, it's really, really nice to see them grow.

If I think about myself when I was 15, what my problems were back then, and I compare it to the young people we work with: wow. They never stop surprising me with their talent. They are so much smarter. Every time we come to the bootcamp, I see them working on their laptops with tools I've never seen before, coming up with crazy ideas.

To give an example: in the last challenge, we had 15 to 19-year-old guys who were working on an underwater drone. That was a cool thing. We had a group that was working on a camera, or like an earplug, for blind people, to tell them what's happening around them. These kinds of ideas. When I was their age, I didn't know what 3D printing was. I mean, back then 3D printing probably didn't exist. But it's really crazy how talented they are. And if you give them the purpose, if you show them that you trust in them and believe in them, they are ready to surprise you positively.

Yeah, so many, so many.

First of all, I believe that we need to start learning for ourselves. Not for our parents, not for our teachers, not to impress or to pass tests. We need to reinvent the relationship we have with education. We need to see it as something positive, something that helps us grow, not something that is stressful or painful. So that's definitely one thing.

And connected with this, and I believe it doesn't seem to change, is the grading system. If you think of it, we are training our young people to fear failure from a very young age. We are grading for what you can't do, instead of what you can do. Instead of pointing out: wow, you knew 80% of all the things that I asked, it's amazing. Or: wow, you have formulated an answer in a way that I have never thought about. So I strongly believe that the grading system needs to change, in terms of: let's embrace the positive sides rather than the negative sides.

And looking at our education: a lot of things have changed, obviously, but what I believe is still not done properly is that we are not focusing enough on the individual strengths of people, right? Imagine if we would really find out what each individual student is good at, what they're passionate about, and if we would hone those skills, instead of learning, again, for a test where you forget all the answers once you've handed it in, right?

Instead, focus on individual strengths and passions and simply say: okay, hey, you are really good at, I don't know, sciences, so let's focus on sciences. You might not have to know, I don't know what, in literature. Let's focus on what you are good at. Then I think it would be incredible. We would have people who are really strong in their own environments.

And plenty of other things. One of them is definitely the definition of success. Again, when I shared my story now, why I considered myself a successful student: I had A's, got a good job, blah, blah, blah. That's okay. But success is not only about money or the position that you get in a company. I think it's important to be content with who you are, to do something that you're really passionate about, to do something that you love.

Wow. I mean, I don't know. I don't think it really changed something. I think it even made it stronger, simply the feeling that we need to create an environment for young people that allows them to thrive personally and professionally.

In my opinion, we need to stop this teacher-student relationship. Instead: what would happen if we all worked together on eye level? And most importantly, we need to create an environment that lets the young people decide for themselves, to trust in them and to simply support them in whatever they do.

I don't know, the becoming a mother thing just made all of this feeling stronger. So I really hope that we can create an educational environment where young people can find their passions and simply go their own way, and become the changemakers of tomorrow.

Thank you, Xerxes. It was lovely to be here. Have a good day too.