financial-education
(5)
Madhu Yalamarthi
Madhu Yalamarthi is the cofounder and CEO of Modak, a fintech company building a Visa debit card and gamified family app that teaches kids and teens to manage money through chores, allowances, savings goals, and rewards. A first-generation high school graduate from rural India, he earned an MBA and MS from Stanford, where he made Arjay Miller Scholar (top 10%), then spent years as a Vice President at GGV Capital deploying roughly $200 million across 14 startups, five of which became unicorns. He left the investor's chair to build the thing he believed in: turning financial literacy into something kids actually want to practice.
Tanya Van Court
Tanya Van Court is the founder and CEO of Goalsetter, a New York-based fintech that teaches American families to save, spend, invest, and build wealth through debit cards with parental controls and culturally fluent, gamified financial-literacy quizzes. A Stanford-trained industrial engineer who ran digital products at ESPN, Nickelodeon, and Discovery Education, she launched Goalsetter in 2016 after her nine-year-old daughter asked for an investment account for her birthday. The company has raised tens of millions of dollars and drawn investors including Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, and Robert F. Smith, while pursuing Van Court's stated mission of closing the racial wealth gap.
Graham Stephan
Graham Stephan is an American personal finance YouTuber, real estate investor, and entrepreneur who turned a real estate license at age 18 into a multimillion-dollar media brand. Known for his signature 20-cent home-brewed coffee philosophy, he has amassed over 5 million YouTube subscribers by making money talk approachable, transparent, and relentlessly actionable. He also co-hosts The Iced Coffee Hour podcast, founded Bankroll Coffee, and built a rental property portfolio in the Los Angeles area before relocating to Las Vegas.
Kyla Scanlon
Kyla Scanlon is an economist, author, and content creator who coined the term 'vibecession' and has built a multi-platform media presence dedicated to making economics accessible. Her debut book 'In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work' (2024) became a New York Times bestseller. She reaches over 1 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, and Twitter/X, and has been named to Barron's 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance. A triple major from Western Kentucky University, she left a career in institutional asset management at Capital Group to pursue financial education full-time.
Ben Carlson
Ben Carlson is a CFA charterholder, Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management, and one of the most widely-read finance writers in the United States. Through his blog A Wealth of Common Sense, co-hosted podcast Animal Spirits, and six books, Carlson has built a reputation for translating Wall Street complexity into plain-English wisdom that ordinary investors can actually use - advocating for simplicity, patience, and behavioral discipline over market-timing and stock-picking.