Silicon Valley loves young founders. Until it doesn’t.
The landscape for young startup founders is shifting as AI tools lower the barrier to entry, allowing teenagers to build companies without traditional Big Tech experience. However, these founders face intense pressure to achieve rapid success while their professional journeys are scrutinized on social media.
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.
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