There is a wave of 20-year-olds dropping out of school to become owners of million-dollar startups.

From the classroom to the AI race

In 2023, Brendan Foody decided to drop out of school halfway through his second year at Georgetown University to join the bustling AI race in San Francisco (USA).

That same year, Karun Kaushik also left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to move to California after building an AI tool in his dorm room.

Similarly, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, who traveled the world after graduating from high school, had the same idea in 2022.

Now, at 22, 21, and 23, Foody, Kaushik, and Carmichael-Jack all run their own AI startups within a 30-minute walk of each other in San Francisco.

They have raised millions of dollars for their businesses and are managing dozens of employees. All are nurturing the dream of making their companies big.

“When ChatGPT came out, it was clear to me that this was a paradigm shift,” said Carmichael-Jack, CEO of Artisan, a company that develops AI sales assistants and has raised more than $35 million. “I knew I wanted to be a part of it.”

Youthful energy of the 9X generation of leaders

These young founders are part of a wave of 20-something CEOs who have flocked to San Francisco amid the AI boom.

Among them are Scott Wu, 28, of Cognition AI; Michael Truell, 24, of Cursor; and Roy Lee, 21, of Cluely. Perhaps the most prominent name is Alexandr Wang, 28, who led the startup Scale AI before being recruited by Meta in June to run its new superintelligence lab.

The emergence of these young CEOs has breathed new life into the AI craze, which has been dominated by established tech giants like Google and Nvidia or decade-old startups like OpenAI.

From left, Mercor CEO Brendan Foody, Delve's Karun Kaushik and Artisan's Jaspar Carmichael-Jack. Photo: NYT

Many young entrepreneurs know each other from college or incubators like Y Combinator. Work is often the focus of their lives, but they also find time to play ping pong, poker, and meet at networking events around town.

Venture capital funds are also contributing to this wave by organizing intensive startup programs for students.

It’s a familiar pattern: a wave of young hopefuls drawn to America’s tech capital by a promising technology, much like how 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and his friends came to Silicon Valley with Facebook in the mid-2000s. Zuckerberg, now 41, famously dropped out of Harvard to start his own business.

Initial successes

“When you have these big tech waves, the whole game changes and everything is up for grabs,” said Saam Motamedi, an investor at Greylock Partners.

Greylock’s San Francisco office recently hosted four 19-year-olds working for a “secretive” AI startup, who have since moved out and gotten their own workspace.

Pete Koomen, a partner at Y Combinator, said the average age of members of the incubator's most recent cohort was 24, down from 30 in 2022.

Foody runs Mercor, a company that uses AI to screen resumes and conduct job interviews. He founded the company with two high school friends, Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath.

They recently raised $100 million, bringing Mercor's total funding to more than $132 million and valuing the startup at $2 billion.

Midha says there is a sense of “extreme urgency” and “existential dread” among peers who believe now is the time to start an AI company.

Foody (center) founded Mercor with high school friends Adarsh Hiremath (left) is the company's chief technology officer and Surya Midha (right) is its chief operating officer. Photo: NYT

Mercor has also created other young CEOs. Rithika Kacham, 22, who dropped out of Stanford in 2024 to join Mercor, founded her own company, Verita AI, in May.

Her company hires experts in a variety of fields to help train AI models to recognize images more accurately.

“This is a turning point in AI, where I feel like almost everyone I knew at Stanford dropped out to co-found a company,” said Kacham, who is majoring in computer science .

Karun Kaushik, CEO of Delve — a startup that automates compliance work for businesses that handle sensitive data — started the company with his MIT classmate, Selin Kocalar.

Initially, they didn't intend to start a business, they just wanted to "make an impact and build something that people would actually use." But after a trip to San Francisco in 2023, they decided to drop out of school to build their startup.

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Kaushik and Kocalar recently hosted an event for startup founders at a San Francisco ping-pong club. Pop music blared while guests—some too young to order drinks—savoured snacks and played ping-pong.

“I don’t think about age,” Kocalar said. “In this day and age, the barrier to entry is very low thanks to AI.”

Soon, they may join an even younger crowd. At a summer program for high school and college students organized by the venture capital firm Founders Inc., 18-year-old Mizan Rupan-Tompkins said he would put his studies on hold to build an AI-powered air traffic controller. “Everything is moving so fast,” Rupan-Tompkins said, “it’s better to get in sooner rather than later, in case I miss a wave.”

(According to NYT)

The man who turned down Mark Zuckerberg's $1 billion offer Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an offer worth up to $1 billion to lure a top AI expert, but was still rejected.

Source: https://vietnamnet.vn/nhung-thu-linh-startup-tuoi-20-cua-lan-song-ai-my-2428774.html