Steve Mariotti built the ideas in this book out of his own classroom experience. Born in 1953 and raised in Flint, Michigan, he studied economics and finance at the University of Michigan and worked as a financial analyst at Ford Motor Company before an unexpected turn pushed him toward teaching. Starting in 1982, he taught remedial math and special education in low income New York City neighborhoods, and he found that students paid far closer attention when he connected math lessons to simple, real world business examples. That discovery led him to found the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship in 1987, an organization built to bring entrepreneurship education to young people in underserved communities. Under his direction, the program grew from a single classroom initiative in the South Bronx into a foundation that has reached more than a million students across dozens of states and countries. Over his career, Mariotti wrote or co wrote more than thirty books and textbooks on entrepreneurship, including this one, and he continued advocating for accessible business education until his death in 2024 at the age of seventy one.
