There’s a thing that happens in seventh grade where you start to understand that the world has an infrastructure, and that some people were born knowing where the doors are.
My name is Arjun Sharda, and I started noticing it around the time I got serious about technology. I’d been coding since I was seven, and by middle school I had open-source projects on GitHub that real companies were downloading — a password generator, a search tool, a time conversion utility. People I’d never met were using things I’d built in my bedroom, which felt significant. But when I tried to find other people doing similar work, tried to build any kind of connection to the broader world of tech and entrepreneurship, I kept running into the same quiet wall. LinkedIn requires you to be sixteen. South by Southwest — Austin’s biggest conference, practically in my backyard — costs $2,200 to attend. Most professional meetups were either age-restricted or just socially assumed to be adult spaces.
None of this was announced. Nobody turned me away at a door. It was more like a series of forms that didn’t have a field for someone my age, events that didn’t occur to me to attend because nothing about them suggested I was supposed to. The professional world wasn’t hostile to me. It just wasn’t arranged with me in mind.
What I kept thinking about was the gap between what school teaches and what actually seems to determine outcomes. I was good at school. But the things schools measure — grades, test scores, attendance — didn’t overlap much with the things that seemed to matter in the real world. Knowing how to introduce yourself to someone you’ve never met. Sending an email to a stranger and having it go somewhere. Finding a mentor, or being the kind of person a mentor wants to invest time in. These aren’t mysterious skills. They’re just not graded. And because they’re not graded, they get passed down informally — mostly from parents who already have them to children who inherit the advantage without knowing it.
In September 2023 I started a club at Brushy Creek Middle School in Leander, Texas. I called it TLEEM — Technology, Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Engineering, and Mathematics — though the name also comes from the Arabic word taleem, meaning education. The original pitch was simple: a space where students could build the kind of network that school wasn’t building for them. Some teachers didn’t think seventh graders would show up for something this serious. Some students didn’t either. I got bullied about it, which taught me something about how people react when you try to formalize something that’s usually informal — when you say out loud that a skill exists and that some people have more access to it than others.
I registered TLEEM as a nonprofit and started posting in online forums. Students from other schools reached out. Then other states. Then other countries. By thirteen we had chapters in Morocco, India, Indonesia, Croatia, Slovakia, and Pakistan. Today TLEEM is Texas’s largest K-12 networking nonprofit — 5,000 members, 37 chapters across 11 countries, with a microgrant program backed by Walmart that funds student-led projects in the Austin area.
What that growth revealed to me is that the problem I’d experienced in Leander wasn’t local. The same pattern kept showing up everywhere: students who were talented and motivated and curious, but who had no infrastructure for connecting their ambitions to the wider world. A member in my area raised over $300,000 for his hackathon at fourteen. Another student told me that getting a reply to his first cold email to a professional was the first time he’d believed someone in that world would take him seriously. What struck me about that wasn’t the reply itself. It was that he’d needed proof. That reaching out had felt presumptuous enough that a response felt like permission.
Social capital — the networks and relationships that shape professional trajectories — is largely treated as something you either have or you don’t. Who you know at twenty-two is usually a function of who your parents knew when you were twelve. That inheritance isn’t inevitable. It’s just what happens when nobody intervenes.
TLEEM is an attempt to intervene a little earlier than that.
