Build in public, fail in public: what it’s like to be a founder under 20 right now

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 couple of summer programs in San Francisco, and cold-DM’ed every Y Combinator founder he could find on LinkedIn until one gave him an angel check for his first company at age 17.

That company, now the 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 lose, and a lot of young founders have the same mindset,” he told TechCrunch. “They just want to win.”

Young founders like Rakhmetzhanov are building under a new set of pressures. Investors are throwing more capital at them, yet the expectation to hit that “north star” milestone — the one big number investors are chasing — hasn’t relaxed, and every misstep along the way is now publicly dissected on social media.

While Silicon Valley VCs have always famously loved backing young college dropout founders, they preferred to see them paired with technical founders, or at least to have some experience — ideally with a FAANG company (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) — on their résumés. In many ways, that is still very true. But AI tools have democratized the opportunity to build, shortening the timelines of success and enabling more young people to start successful companies without stepping foot inside a Big Tech company.

Pranjali Awasthi, 19, is an example of that. She dropped out of high school to launch an AI startup, then attended Georgia Tech before dropping out of that, too, to launch Slashy, a YC-backed startup that bills itself as the “Cursor for emails” and helps consumers manage their email inboxes. After more than a year running that company, she recently announced she’s now building yet a new startup currently in stealth.

When she was younger, around 14 or 15, she recalled, investors whom she would pitch often asked why she was looking to build a company. “It’s gotten more normal now,” she said, “post-18.”

It seems more than ever, investors look to founders like Awasthi, whose experiences can be traced through “GitHub activity, open-source contributions, communities they’ve already built, and familiarity with all the latest tools in AI,” Ashley Smith, a general partner at the early-stage firm Vermilion, told TechCrunch. “A lot of young developers learn how to build software through contributing to open-source projects or toying around with the latest AI tooling,” she explained. “They have more time to do that while in college or younger than someone with a full-time job and a mortgage.”