Kids today

When Heather Holst-Knudsen wanted to go Spain after college, she found a novel way to pay for the trip.

The recent Georgetown graduate, in the days before Amazon, wrote a cookbook. Then she sold it door-to-door to help get some extra cash for her journey. Says Holst-Knudsen: “I always had an entrepreneurial attitude.”

After a 20-year executive career in marketing, manufacturing and publishing, Holst-Knudsen has taken that attitude to a new place: a startup that's a platform for children and teenagers to build a business through crowdfunding, where capital is raised online in small increments in exchange for special perks.