Build publicly, fail publicly: What it’s like to be an under-20 founder right now

For Arlan Rakhmtzanov, 19, there is no middle ground. He says he either builds a valuable company like Google, or fails and ends up on the streets. He started programming when he was 15 in his native Kazakhstan, completed two summer programs in San Francisco, and DMed every Y Combinator founder he could find on LinkedIn until someone gave him an angel check for his first company at 17 years old.

This company, now YC-backed Nozomio, is an AI Agent Index API — 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 many young founders have the same mindset,” he told TechCrunch. “They just want to win.”

Young founders like Rakhmtzanov are building their businesses under a new set of pressures. Investors are pouring more capital into it, yet expectations of it achieving this “North Star” milestone – the one big number that investors are chasing – have not subsided, and every mistake along the way is now being dissected publicly on social media.

While Silicon Valley venture capitalists always like to back young founders leaving college, they preferred to see them paired with tech founders, or at least have some experience — ideally with a FAANG (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) company — on their resume. In many ways, this is still very true. But AI tools have democratized the opportunity to build, shortening timelines for success, and enabling more young people to create successful companies without setting foot inside big tech companies.

Pranjali Awasthi, 19, is a case in point. She dropped out of high school to launch an AI startup, then attended Georgia Tech before also dropping out to launch Slashy, a YC-backed startup that describes itself as an “email index” that helps consumers manage their email inboxes. After more than a year of running that company, she recently announced that she is now building a new startup that is currently operating underground.

She recalled that when she was younger, around 14 or 15, the investors she was pitching to would often wonder why she was trying to build a company. “It’s more normal now, after 18,” she said.

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

Smith said a “meaningful” share of her portfolio was made up of companies founded by people under 30, with a few under 21, adding that she was “obviously not skeptical of young people”.

She continued: “What they lack in experience, they make up for in excitement for the experience and lack of fear.”

But she admits that the market has become harsher. “It doesn’t give you room to learn slowly anymore,” she said. There are more funding opportunities than ever before, regardless of age – accelerators, incubators, and pre-seed funds. But that money comes with strings attached: Founders like Rakhmtzanov and Awasthi, who have multimillion-dollar holdings, are expected to achieve growth within months, not years.

“The tolerance that existed at an early stage and the assumption that you iterate your way to get to the market for a product doesn’t exist now,” Smith continued. “Everyone is looking for the next indicator, even though this growth trajectory is an anomaly, not the norm.”

For many founders — especially those who are building their businesses publicly — the constant pressure to succeed can lead to murky ethical territory, or even predatory deal terms, since younger founders are often too new to the game to know what the norm is, yet ambitious enough to chase growth at all costs. To keep up, revenue numbers started to look inflated, while content creation for social media started to crowd out writing good code. This hyperbolic attitude is perhaps inevitable, given that getting attention is now harder than ever in the crowded AI market.

It’s all about who can convince “the most people (they) are smarter than everyone else in this field, and make the most noise about it,” Smith said.

“In 2004, you could quietly repeat for years without anyone watching you,” Awasthi added. “Now there’s this constant ambient pressure from LinkedIn and Twitter where every raise, every milestone, every pivot is announced.”

This means that some young founders are not only worried about achieving competitive revenue marks or funding evaluations – they are also under pressure to perform the façade of being a successful founder. This pressure has always been present in startup culture, but founders say it has become more extreme. “If you’re a startup competing in a market, you usually worry about established companies,” Timothy Chen, an investor at Essence Ventures, told TechCrunch. “Now you worry about your neighbors.”

For example, he noted, “Everyone makes great, good-looking videos.” “That wasn’t the case three years ago.” The trend was popularized by Cluely founder Roy Lee, now nearly 22, whose startup initially promised to help students cheat on exams — a premise that wowed investors like Andreessen Horowitz and helped the company raise $20 million.

Although Cluely is now just a note-taking tool, Lee has become a face for young talent in Silicon Valley. “The pressure comes from that I need to do better and quickly,” Chen continued.

Not hitting the crossbar created a new concern. “When Zook was building Facebook, there wasn’t this huge passive social ecosystem,” Aidan Gou, 20, told TechCrunch. He is the co-founder of AI desktop assistant startup Attention Engineering, which has raised about $1.6 million in funding to date.

Much of the pressure, as he describes it, is self-imposed. He continued, “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.” “And then you have all these people piling on any mistake you make. I think people need to be more compassionate.”

Amidst all these pressures, Awasthi is taking a page from the good old days. “If you focus your time on what needs to get done, it won’t be so difficult,” she said.

“The best product that stays active and talks to customers wins,” Rakhmtzanov 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 puts it. None of it has anything to do with age.