Kevin Hartz tends to be the first through the door. In 2001, he co-founded Xoom, when sending money across borders meant standing in line at Western Union. In 2013 it went public and in 2015 PayPal paid $1.1 billion for it. Four years after launching Xoom, he co-founded Eventbrite, which went public in 2018 and turned buying event tickets into something you could do without wanting to throw your laptop into the ocean.
After a stint at Founders Fund, Hartz co-founded his own venture capital firm, A* Capital (a nod to a computer science algorithm), and then, in 2020, spotted another trend in front of the masses: the SPAC boom. His blank check company, one, swallowed 3D printing outfit Markforged in a $2.1 billion reverse merger in 2021, just as every other financier in Silicon Valley suddenly decided that SPACs were the future.
Now Harts is onto his next thing – teenage founders, not as a social experiment but as an unplanned investment thesis. His company recently cut a check to Aaruan AI prediction engine with a founder who was too young to get a driver’s license at the time. Harts is not alone in this. The drop-and-build movement, made best known by founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, is becoming a typical lifestyle choice for a certain kind of ambitious kid.
Consider Cory Levy, who interned at Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures, and Techstars while still in high school, then bailed out at the University of Illinois after his freshman year. Today it runs Z Colleaguesa week-long accelerator that gives tech founders—even high schoolers—$10,000 grants; When Levy dropped out a decade ago, the Thiel Fellowship was a radical new idea. Now, the “dropout community is at an all-time high,” he said he told Business Insider last spring. “At a large group dinner of 15 or 20 people, we’ll look around the table and nobody has a college degree.”
It’s becoming enough of a “thing” that accelerator Y Combinator, which has quietly fostered dropout culture since its inception, recently launched a program designed for students who want to start companies but don’t want to drop out of school. The program allows them to apply while still in school, be accepted and funded immediately, and defer participation in YC until they graduate. (For YC, known for being counter-cultural, the move is very on-brand.)
Of course, TechCrunch is covering the trend: see here and here and here. But to learn more, I’ll be sitting down with Hartz at the StrictlyVC event as part of TechCrunch’s rolling Disrupt show, which kicks off in San Francisco on Monday, October 27. (Harts speaks on Tuesday, October 28.)
In the meantime, here are excerpts from a conversation we had on Friday where we began to explore the topic:
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
27-29 October 2025
TC: We’ve always seen teenagers start companies, but we definitely feel like we’re seeing more than ever before, and you’re telling me that’s happening behind the scenes. Why do you think that is?
Kevin Hartz: You find these very bright kids who are just really bored in school. I see classes of Stanford freshmen or sophomores who fall into this category — they were completely bored, some ended up at home and just excelled. Even at the top universities, they still go and give up with a thirst to build, to learn, to push the envelope. We had a company where the founders were 18, 18 and 15 years old. I think the CTO is probably 16 now, but he was 15 at the time we backed them. But this is not really unusual.
How does Z Fellows compare to Thiel Fellowshipreleased years ago by Peter Thiel?
It’s incredibly similar. The difference is that the Thiel Fellowship is a nonprofit, and — I’m a big fan of Peter’s — but as a nonprofit, you might not run as hard. Corey [has] just [been] out there the Z Fellows building for the last few years, and it’s a really great program. It is again this fact that Peter is ahead of the curve, seeing the value in the irony of being offered money to quit. This phenomenon is growing and growing, and who knows how far it will continue, especially with the costs of universities and what many people see as a toxic environment in poorly managed universities. All of this prompts teenagers to ask, “Why don’t I give it up and build?”
Do Z Fellows get equity in the companies?
They offer a very small check – $10,000. Then there’s a fund where they support people later down the line. But it’s mostly a no-obligation $10,000 starter piece. I think Cory picks two people to put $100,000 in pre-seed [rounds]also.
What do you think about the statistics we see about kids not being able to get a job out of school? I have to believe some of it is driven by the realization that even if you graduate, there may not be a job waiting for you.
There’s this other phenomenon happening – this bump that’s supposed to happen in ’26 or ’27 where there will be more 1099s than W-2s. It just means that 30 years ago, people worked for big companies like Nestlé or McKinsey or IBM. Now they work for themselves. They trade crypto or build their own businesses. This shows American individualism. It’s almost as if the United States is going into entrepreneurial overdrive.
I think it’s because people want to start companies, but I also think that, more and more, people have to start companies as they’re being pushed out of their roles because of the efficiencies that have come from AI and stuff.
Paul Graham said something years ago that has always stuck with me, that it’s good and bad for a young founder when his startup takes off because it takes over his life. You were a young entrepreneur. How do you feel when you fund a 15-year-old knowing that their company may do very well and that person may never have the ability to experience what most 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds experience?
I found it to be an exhilarating experience, but it was interspersed with painful challenges. It emphasizes everything. And it’s a good point. [Seventeen,] this is the age of marines who send into battle because they are fearless. Maybe there is something about that age where people are too hard on driving. But I wonder if it’s too early to understand the implications, given the recent importance of this phenomenon.
We’re just at the beginning of what I would call a super cycle of scalability in technology, with artificial intelligence and everything else — especially artificial intelligence. We are at a very early stage. You have OpenAI and Anthropic developing incredibly fast on the core part of the model. Now we all start working on the application layers. You have the coding co-pilots like Cognition, and then you have Decagon and Sierra in the AI CRM space. But there are so many other categories that need to be disrupted. Even Sierra and Decagon are very, very early in their missions.
You have daughters. Would you like to see them go to college? How would you feel if they said, “Dad, I want to start something now and not go to college”?
Our 17 year old is applying to colleges now. He wants the college experience. He wants that taste of life. He never really questioned it. I tried to give her as many opportunities as I could to consider alternatives, and I will do the same with our next 13 year old.
Of the bets you’ve placed in the last year, how many would you say involve teenagers?
Close to 20%.
And how about two years ago?
About 5%.
