The Capitalyst: You transitioned from working in tech startups to founding Ultra Education and teaching entrepreneurship to children as young as 7. What was the defining moment in your early tech career that led you to shift your focus toward empowering young people to launch their own businesses?
Julian Hall: The shift did not happen as a single dramatic moment but as a growing compulsion that became impossible to ignore. While working in technology startups, I increasingly felt that I was optimising solutions to technical problems that were interesting but not necessarily the most important contribution I could make to society. The deeper issue I kept returning to was not about software or platforms, but about people. Specifically, how early life experiences shape confidence, agency, and economic independence over the long term.
I began reflecting on my own journey into entrepreneurship at a young age. I had learned through exposure, trial and error, and necessity rather than through any formal structure. That experience gave me resilience, commercial instinct, and adaptability long before I had the language to describe those traits. What struck me was how accidental that pathway was, and how many young people never encounter it at all.
At the same time, I was mentoring and working alongside young people who were highly capable but disconnected from how the real economy works. They were intelligent, motivated, and creative, yet lacked structured opportunities to experiment with business, money, and value creation in a safe environment. That disconnect felt far more consequential than any technical inefficiency I was addressing in my professional work.
The realisation was simple but powerful. If entrepreneurship had been intentionally structured and taught to me earlier, I would have avoided years of unnecessary friction. Ultra Education emerged from the idea of reverse engineering that lived experience and turning it into a repeatable, accessible framework so the next generation does not have to rely on chance to develop entrepreneurial capability.
The Capitalyst: You have spoken about addressing the gap between traditional schooling and the demands of the modern workplace. In your experience, what is the most significant skill gap that schools are failing to address?
Julian Hall: The most significant gap is not technical skills or even digital literacy. It is economic agency. By that, I mean the ability to understand how value is created, how money moves through systems, and how individual decisions compound over time in the real world.
Schools are still largely designed around certainty. Clear answers, fixed pathways, and linear progression. The modern workplace operates in the opposite way. Ambiguity, rapid change, portfolio careers, and constant reinvention are now the norm. Young people are rarely taught how to make decisions when there is no obvious right answer, no guaranteed outcome, and no authority figure to validate their choice.
What concerns me most is that young people leave education academically qualified but economically unprepared. They may understand subjects, but they do not understand how income is generated, how risk works, or how to respond when a plan does not work. That lack of agency creates dependency and anxiety at precisely the moment when resilience and adaptability are most needed.
Bridging that gap requires more than curriculum reform. It requires experiential learning that allows young people to test ideas, handle money, fail safely, and reflect on outcomes. Without that, we are preparing them for a world that no longer exists.
The Capitalyst: If you could only teach today’s young people three entrepreneurial skills to survive the next 20 years, what would they be?
Julian Hall: The first would be problem identification. Not idea generation, but the ability to observe the world critically and recognise problems that are worth solving. Too many people are taught to start with solutions before understanding context. Entrepreneurship starts with seeing friction, inefficiency, or unmet need and being curious enough to explore it.
The second would be execution under uncertainty. This is the capacity to act without perfect information, approval, or confidence. The next twenty years will reward those who can move forward despite ambiguity rather than waiting for clarity that never arrives. This skill alone separates those who progress from those who remain stuck in preparation.
The third would be financial decision making as a life skill. Understanding cash flow, delayed gratification, risk, leverage, and time horizons is foundational. Whether someone becomes an entrepreneur, an employee, or something in between, financial literacy determines the quality of choices they make and the options available to them later in life.
Together, these skills create independence. Not just economically, but psychologically.
The Capitalyst: AskUltra operated from 2020 to 2023 and was discontinued just as AI technology gained mainstream prominence. What led to that decision, and what did you learn from the experience?
Julian Hall: AskUltra was conceived before large language models as we now understand them entered the mainstream. At the time, the ambition was to create an intelligent digital mentor that could support young people with entrepreneurship, decision making, and confidence building at scale. Conceptually, the vision was sound. Practically, the technology ecosystem simply was not ready.
Pre ChatGPT, building anything resembling conversational intelligence required bespoke development, narrow rule based systems, and significant infrastructure costs. Creating your own AI was not only technically constrained but financially prohibitive, particularly for a youth focused social enterprise working within responsible safeguarding and ethical boundaries. The tools we take for granted today did not exist, and the resource burden required to maintain quality and safety was disproportionate to what we could reasonably sustain.
The decision to discontinue AskUltra was therefore a strategic pause rather than a failure. It reflected an honest assessment that the underlying technology had not yet reached the inflection point required to deliver what we had envisioned without compromising quality or mission integrity.
The key lesson was timing and restraint. Innovation is not just about being early, but about knowing when the environment is mature enough to support responsible execution. When the ChatGPT moment arrived, it validated the original thinking behind AskUltra, but it also confirmed that stepping back when we did was the right decision. It allowed us to return to AI later with far greater clarity, capability, and alignment with our values.
The Capitalyst: You have written bestsellers like Entrepreneur to Ultrapreneur. What is one non negotiable habit separating ultrapreneurs from burnout prone founders?
Julian Hall: The defining habit is the ability to build structure early rather than relying on personal endurance. Burnout prone founders tend to equate commitment with constant involvement. Ultrapreneurs understand that sustainability comes from systems, not sacrifice.
This shows up in how they delegate, how they document processes, and how early they separate identity from execution. Instead of being indispensable, they aim to be replaceable. That mindset shift is subtle but profound.
On a personal level, I learned this the hard way. Early in my journey, progress often came at the expense of health, relationships, and perspective. Over time, it became clear that resilience is not about doing more. It is about designing businesses and lives that can function without constant personal input.
Ultrapreneurs protect their energy because they understand that long term impact requires longevity.
The Capitalyst: Through initiatives like YoBuDiShop and Young Investor Week, you are providing young people with practical investor education. What is one initiative or development from this year that you believe is making a real impact on youth financial literacy?
Julian Hall: Young Investor Week stands out because it shifts financial education from abstract knowledge to lived experience. Young people are not just learning terminology. They are analysing assets, discussing risk, and understanding how long term thinking changes outcomes.
What has been particularly impactful this year is the focus on mindset alongside mechanics. We are not teaching young people how to get rich quickly. We are teaching them how to think patiently, ethically, and strategically about money. That distinction matters.
I have seen young people completely reframe their relationship with money over the course of a single programme. They begin to see income as something they can influence, investing as something accessible, and financial planning as a tool rather than a source of anxiety.
That confidence shift is difficult to measure, but it is transformative. It is also the foundation upon which all future financial decisions are built.
The Capitalyst: As you look ahead to 2026, what ambitious goal or project for Ultra Education or Young Investor Week are you most excited about pursuing?
Julian Hall: Looking ahead to 2026, what excites me most is the evolution of Ultra Education as a youth social enterprise that sits at the intersection of education, workforce development, and economic strategy. The ambition is to move beyond programme delivery and into systems level impact.
I want Ultra Education to be recognised as infrastructure. Not just preparing young people for the future of work, but actively shaping how organisations, policymakers, and employers think about talent pipelines, productivity, and long term economic resilience. That means positioning young people not as beneficiaries of support, but as contributors to innovation, value creation, and problem solving.
With initiatives like Young Investor Week, the goal is to normalise financial literacy and investment thinking as core life skills rather than niche knowledge. By 2026, I want these programmes embedded into mainstream conversations about economic inclusion, social mobility, and national competitiveness.
On a personal level, this phase feels like a convergence of everything I have learned across entrepreneurship, education, and systems building. It is about scale with intention, and about ensuring that the next generation enters adulthood with capability rather than anxiety about the economic world they are inheriting.
