Meet our Seniors: Kaden Anderson

Kaden Anderson is in business.

He started his first lemonade stand in elementary school, and has been growing the profits from that venture ever since. It turns out that while his classmates were reading Harry Potter, he'd picked up a book on trading stocks.

"I've always loved business and learning about it," Kaden said. "I love the idea of investing. I love seeing growth compound. There really is a correspondence between risk and return, so the more you put up, the more you can make, but a lot of people will go in there and do some things that I find pretty risky."

After middle school, he started buying and selling cars for other people. He has continued to invest, switching from day trading to selling stock options, and a couple years ago, he started his own online business, which he really enjoyed until the coronavirus slowed his supplier in China.

Theorizing that girls like to buy things, and having a sister to provide input, he settled on the idea of selling a cosmetic bag after considering a lot of different products.

"It was a quick folding makeup bag, it really wasn't one you could get anywhere else," Kaden said. He made a video, reached out to popular posters on Instagram and it wasn't long before he was making profits.

Kaden is in Running Start this year and has learned he is the first student not only to earn a high school diploma, but also to get the business degree at Lower Columbia College.

"It was really tricky getting the high school requirements and the business requirements," Kaden said. "I've taken a year of accounting and business calculus and all this stuff that doesn't really help my high school degree."

Don Cox remains one Kaden's favorite teachers.

"He applies our learning into real world scenarios," Kaden said. "I think doing that has really helped me understand history better. Mr. Cox places a lot of importance on understanding history from both sides. Because a lot of time you share the winner of history, from that perspective, but he really focused on making sure both sides were heard and how the whole story happened."

Kaden, the son of Hilarie Larson, has a full ride to the University of Arizona but is waiting to hear from his first choice, the University of Washington, where he would like to continue his studies in business.