Tanya Van Court

A debit card, a quiz, and a strategy for allowance

Open the Goalsetter app and a child sees something most adults never had at nine: a savings goal with a name on it. A bike. A pair of sneakers. A share of a company they like. Tanya Van Court built the whole thing around a single conviction, that kids will learn money if you stop lecturing them and start speaking their language.

That language is hip-hop, memes, and pop culture. Goalsetter wraps real banking, a kid-and-teen debit card with parental controls, automatic round-ups, and goal-based saving, around financial-literacy quizzes that sound less like a textbook and more like a group chat. The platform stretches from infancy to high school, and it sells to families and schools alike. Behind the playful surface sits an industrial engineer who spent two decades learning exactly how to hold a young person's attention.

Van Court does not pitch Goalsetter as a budgeting tool. She pitches it as a wealth-building habit installed early, before the first paycheck, before the first credit card, before the patterns harden. Her phrasing for it has a mission attached: teach kids to think like owners, not just spenders.

The birthday wish that started a company

When her daughter turned nine, she did not ask for toys. She asked for an investment account and a bike. Van Court went looking for a product that could grant that wish, somewhere a kid could set a goal, save toward it, and learn how investing actually works. Nothing fit. So in 2016 she made one.

The detail matters because it explains the product's strange shape. Goalsetter is a bank account that behaves like a video game, a savings tool that talks like a nine-year-old, an investing primer disguised as a quiz. It exists because a child described what she wanted in plain terms, and her mother happened to be the rare person who could build it.

From a million dollars to zero, and back

Van Court grew up in Oakland. Her mother died of a brain aneurysm when Tanya was six, and an aunt raised her on a steady diet of Black history and STEM. She went to Stanford and came out with a degree in industrial engineering in 1994, then a master's in the same field in 2001.

Her first brush with sudden wealth ended badly. As a vice president at Covad Communications, she watched her stock cross a million dollars when the company went public in January 2000. The dot-com bubble burst, Covad went bankrupt, and the paper fortune vanished. The lesson did not. Building wealth and keeping it turned out to be two different skills, and almost no one teaches the second one early.

What followed was a tour through the companies that shaped how kids and families used screens. She led new media products at ESPN and helped launch ESPN3. She ran the digital preschool and parenting businesses at Nickelodeon, including NickJr.com and Noggin.com. As a senior vice president at Discovery Education, she put digital textbooks into schools across the country. Every stop taught her the same thing from a different angle: how to make something educational that a kid will actually choose to open.

Eight to one, and counting

Van Court points to a 2019 Federal Reserve finding that the typical white family holds about eight times the wealth of the typical Black family. She treats that ratio as a product spec, not just a statistic. Goalsetter's reason to exist is to close it, starting with the youngest customers, because compound interest rewards whoever starts first.

She has been candid that the moment shifted in 2020. After the murder of George Floyd, investor attention turned toward Black-owned businesses, and Goalsetter secured its early seed funding. She built on it rather than waited for it.

Not just an app on a kid's phone

Goalsetter runs on two tracks at once. One is direct to families: a household downloads it, parents set the controls, kids set goals, money moves. The other is institutional. Van Court takes the curriculum into schools and partners with banks and employers, which is why the cap table holds names like Fiserv and Webster Bank alongside the athletes. A financial-education company that only reaches the families already thinking about financial education would miss the point. The reach has to extend to the households that were never handed the playbook.

That second track shows up in programs aimed squarely at access. Goalsetter has pushed initiatives to widen financial literacy among young people who rarely see investing modeled at home, framing the work as wealth-building rather than charity. The distinction is deliberate. Van Court talks about ownership, not assistance, and she designs the product so a kid graduates from setting a savings goal to understanding what it means to hold a piece of a company.

The engineering background keeps surfacing here. She does not describe Goalsetter as a feel-good cause; she describes it as a system with inputs and outputs, where the input is early habit and the output is a different financial trajectory. The quizzes, the round-ups, the debit card, the parental controls, each is a lever, and she has spent years tuning which ones actually move a young person's behavior.

A storyteller who can read a balance sheet

Securing Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Andre Drummond, actor Lance Gross, and Vista Equity's Robert F. Smith on a single cap table is not an accident of timing. It is a sales skill. Van Court spent two decades learning how to make complicated ideas land with audiences that have other options, first for kids watching cartoons, then for teachers choosing textbooks. She turned that same instinct on investors.

She has told the story of building Goalsetter repeatedly in public, in Authority Magazine's series on women leaders in tech, on podcasts, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and on Shark Tank in 2019. The throughline is consistent: she leads with the kid who wanted an investment account, then connects it to a number, the eight-to-one wealth gap, and lets the audience close the loop themselves. It is the move of someone who knows that a statistic alone does not raise money or change behavior. A story does.

Wider, younger, earlier

The 2024 Series A extension, $9.6 million led by the MM Catalyst Fund, an Edward Jones and MassMutual affiliate, was raised to do more of the same at greater scale: help American families learn to save, spend, invest, and build wealth. The investor mix, traditional financial institutions writing checks into a culturally fluent kid-money platform, hints at where the category is heading. The incumbents have realized that the next generation of customers is being formed right now, and that whoever teaches them tends to keep them.

Van Court's seat on the FDIC's Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion puts the same argument in front of regulators. The work is no longer a single app trying to be sticky; it is a case that financial literacy belongs in childhood, embedded in the products kids already use, taught in the language they already speak. She has been making that case since a nine-year-old described exactly what she wanted and nobody had built it yet. The wish is the same. The scale is the only thing that keeps changing.