For Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, 19, there is no middle ground. Either he builds a company as valuable as Google, he says, or he fails and ends up on the streets. He started coding at 15 in his native Kazakhstan, completed a few summer programs in San Francisco, and cold DMed every Y Combinator founder he could find on LinkedIn until one handed him an angel check for his first company at 17.
That company, now YC-backed Nozomio, is an API index for AI agents — a tool that helps AI agents find and use software services — and has raised more than $6 million in funding to date. “I either win or I lose, and a lot of new founders have the same mindset,” he told TechCrunch. “They just want to win”
New founders like Rakhmetzhanov are building under a new set of pressures. Investors are pouring more capital into them, yet the expectation to hit that “north star” milestone — the one big number investors are chasing — hasn’t eased, and every misstep along the way is publicly dissected on social media.
While Silicon Valley VCs have always loved backing young founders who dropped out of college, they preferred to see them paired with tech founders or at least have some experience—ideally with a FAANG (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) company—on their resume. In many ways, this is still true. However, AI tools have democratized the opportunity to build, shortening the timelines for success and enabling more young people to start successful companies without setting foot in a Big Tech company.
Pranjali Awasthi, 19, is an example of this. Dropped out of high school to start an AI startup, then attended Georgia Tech before dropping out, too, to start Slashy, a YC-backed startup billed as the “Email Cursor” that helps consumers manage their email inbox. After more than a year of running this company, he recently announced that he is now building a new startup that is currently under wraps.
When she was younger, around 14 or 15, she recalls, the investors she pitched to often asked why she wanted to start a company. “It’s become more normal now,” she said, “after 18.”
It seems more than ever, investors are looking to founders like Awasthi, whose experience can be traced through their “GitHub activity, open source contributions, communities they’ve already built, and familiarity with all the latest AI tools,” Ashley Smith, general partner at early-stage firm Vermilion, told TechCrunch. “Many young developers learn how to build software by contributing to open source projects or playing with the latest AI tools,” he explained. “They have more time to do it while they’re in college or younger than someone with a full-time job and a mortgage.”
Smith said a “significant” share of her portfolio is made up of companies founded by people under 30, with a handful even under 21, she said, adding that she is “obviously not a skeptic of youth”.
“What they lack in experience, they make up for in enthusiasm for experimentation and a lack of fear,” he continued.
But he admits the market has become more ruthless. “It no longer gives you room to learn slowly,” he said. There are more funding opportunities than ever, regardless of age — accelerators, incubators, upfront funds. But that money comes with strings attached: Founders like Rakhmetzhanov and Awasthi, with millions in cash, are expected to deliver growth in months, not years.
“The forgiveness that was there early on and the assumption that you would iterate your way through product-to-market fit isn’t there right now,” Smith continued. “Everyone is looking for the next Runner, even though this development trajectory is an outlier, not the norm.”
For many founders—especially those who build publicly—the relentless pursuit of success can lead to murky ethical territory or even aggressive deal terms, as younger founders are often too new to the game to know what the norm is, but ambitious enough to chase growth at all costs. To keep up, revenue numbers are starting to look inflated, while creating content for social media is starting to crowd out writing good code. Excessive posturing is perhaps inevitable as attracting attention is now more difficult than ever in a crowded AI market.
The point is who can convince “the most [they] they’re smarter than everyone else in the space,” Smith said, “and they’re making the most noise about it.”
“In 2004, you could repeat quietly for years without being seen,” Awasthi added. “Now there’s this constant environmental pressure from LinkedIn and Twitter where every raise, every milestone, every milestone is public.”
This means that some new founders aren’t just worried about achieving competitive revenue or funding valuations—they’re also under pressure to put on the appearance of a successful founder. This pressure has always existed in startup culture, but founders say it has become more extreme. “If you’re a startup and you’re competing in a market, you usually worry about the incumbents,” Timothy Chen, an investor at Essence Ventures, told TechCrunch. “Now you’re worried about your neighbors.”
For example, “everyone makes shiny, beautiful startup videos,” he noted. “It wasn’t even a thing three years ago.” The trend was popularized by Cluely founder Roy Lee, now about age 22, whose startup originally promised to help students cheat on exams — a premise that dazzled investors like Andreessen Horowitz and helped the company raise $20 million.
Although Cluely is now more of a note-taking tool, Lee has become the face of young talent in Silicon Valley. “The pressure comes from ‘I have to show much better, fast,'” Chen continued.
Not hitting the forearm has created new stress. “When Zuck was building Facebook, there wasn’t this huge negative social ecosystem,” Aidan Guo, 20, told TechCrunch. He is the co-founder of artificial intelligence desktop assistant startup Attention Engineering, which has raised about $1.6 million in funding to date.
Much of the strain, as he describes it, is self-imposed. “You already have a constant fear of failure in your mind. You have to steer the ship and learn all these things as you go. And everything can always go wrong at once,” he continued. “And then you have all these people piling on anything you do wrong. I think people need to be more empathetic.”
Amidst all this pressure, Awasthi takes a page from the past. “If you focus your time on what needs to be done, it’s not too difficult,” he said.
“The best product that stays active and talks to customers wins,” Rakhmetzhanov added.
In the end, the founders all describe the same thing: The fundamentals of a good startup haven’t changed — “conviction, intellectual honesty and customer obsession,” as Smith put it. None of this has anything to do with age.
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