Prof G Media research analyst Kristin O’Donoghue asks: Why does it feel like everyone under 30 is becoming a founder?
Elon Musk once said that “running a startup is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss.”
For a growing number of young people, that bloody abyss looks less terrifying — and somehow more compelling than a 9 to 5.
What’s Happening?
Entrepreneurship is surging. The number of U.S. professionals adopting the title of “founder” on LinkedIn increased 69% in 2025 and is up 300% since 2022.
Gen Z is leading the charge. Fifty percent of Gen Z adults plan to start a new business or side hustle in 2026, compared with 44% of millennials and 31% of Gen X. The median age of a Y Combinator founder is 24, down from 30 in 2022, and the number of accepted applicants between 18 and 22 increased 110% last year.
Three forces are driving the uptick in young entrepreneurs.
AI gives younger, inexperienced workers foundational competence across a range of skills needed to launch a business (coding, writing, marketing, etc.), making ideas easier to test, and startups easier to launch.
A cooling job market has made traditional jobs harder to get.
Gen Z grew up seeing the founder lifestyle glorified in the media, markets, even politics. The AI boom has only brightened the spotlight.
The AI Advantage
Despite a handful of exceptions from the dot-com era (Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Marc Andreessen), the conventional wisdom was that the best founders had decades of experience. In 2018, Harvard Business Review found that the average age of a successful startup founder was 45.
But AI might change that.
AI lowers barriers to experimentation, meaning that demos, pitches, and previews that used to take months are now buildable in days. AI coding tools allow college students to make working apps in hours, and LLMs can spin up marketing videos in minutes.
One founder I spoke with, Chirag Kulkarni, told me that “Your first idea probably won’t be the one you take to scale. But you can iterate, test, and move quickly with AI.”
AI makes experimenting easier — and experience less essential. Before, you needed years in an industry to understand how to build products, a network to find talent and customers, and domain expertise to avoid obvious mistakes. Now, you can access baseline competence in many of these areas with just a few prompts.
This doesn’t make experience irrelevant, but it dramatically levels the playing field.
Sequoia Capital partner David Cahn has argued that AI is a structural advantage for young people, allowing young builders to reach competence quickly.
“No one has more than five years of experience with ChatGPT and LLMs, so a 24-year-old who has spent the last five years deep in the weeds of AI may actually have more relevant experience than someone who has been working for much longer,” Cahn wrote. He’s backed several companies started by young entrepreneurs, including Flapping Airplanes and Juicebox.
Baseline abilities are now table stakes, so the competitive advantage in entrepreneurship has shifted to skills that young people are naturally good at: executing quickly, tolerating risk, and approaching problems without preconceived notions.
Andreessen Horowitz, which allocated roughly 18% of all U.S. venture capital dollars last year, put out a specific call in March for young technical founders. They observed that young entrepreneurs approach problems with “an infinite canvas,” a creative freedom that prioritizes innovation over experience.
Today, the average top AI founder is 29, five years younger than the average SaaS founder in the 2010s.
Alexandr Wang was 28 when Meta bought half of Scale AI for $14 billion in 2025. Cursor’s founders were MIT graduates in their early 20s; four years later, their company is valued at almost $30 billion. Perplexity was founded by Aravind Srinivas at 28, and Harvey’s founding team was also composed of late 20-somethings.
“If you’re young and lack priors, it’s easier to throw yourself in and learn the tools,” Matt White, co-founder of Propolis, told me.
White said he felt like an old man when he was at the startup accelerator Y Combinator. He’s 30.
AI tools allow young founders to experiment and grow while keeping their companies small. Early-stage tech startups in the U.S. are raising more money than equivalent firms did five years ago, but they’re employing 16% fewer workers.
Brian Geiger, co-founder of edtech company Scholarships360, decided not to hire any front-end developers for his startup, because he could use Claude Sonnet to do the work himself. “Agents have infinite stamina,” Geiger said. “You can just keep asking them to do more.”
White said that the quality assurance tool his team at Propolis built in the last nine months would have taken an “order of magnitude” more talent and time without AI tools.
The Economic Push
Entrepreneurship is increasingly viewed not just as a moon shot but as a hedge. If entry-level roles can be automated or outsourced, then “safe” jobs look less safe. Starting your own company begins to look like a stable path — or at least a path forward.
Entrepreneurship is becoming more common for new college graduates. One in five millennials and Gen Z small-business owners were unemployed or students before starting their businesses, compared with just 3% of Gen X and baby boomer founders.
The calculus makes sense: New grad hiring was down 16% in 2025 and continues to slide. Even for the young people who were hired, inflation-adjusted salaries for new grads are down more than 20% since 2022.
Climbing the career ladder is increasingly difficult. Promotions have declined across the board, but young people have been hit hardest. The promotion rate for workers ages 20 to 34 has dropped nearly 4% since 2019, while the rate for workers 35 to 54 has stayed relatively stable.
Startup FOMO
Gen Z grew up immersed in America’s obsession with entrepreneurship. Shows like Silicon Valley, Billions, Succession, The Bear, Industry all dramatize the formidable task of creating a business from scratch.
The drum beats even louder on social media. Zoomers overindex on entrepreneurship whenever we consume content. Watching viral success stories on YouTube, tracking the rise of TikTok influencers and Twitch streamers, and reading curated announcements of funding rounds on X create an echo chamber that makes the startup life look alluring — almost easy.
As Livia Pinzari, founder of digital advertising firm NoLie Communications, told me, “You wake up feeling like someone starts a new business every other day.”
Of course, the media’s portrayal of entrepreneurship obscures the harsh reality that 90% of startups fail. Scrolling through LinkedIn, you’d never know it. Enter survivorship bias: the tendency to judge one’s own chances of success based on visible successes.
When One Door Closes…
The unemployment rate of new college graduates is the highest it’s been in a decade (excluding COVID). The Wall Street Journal called it an “employment crisis.” This is a problem that deserves the attention of policymakers.
But the way that young people have responded — many, by starting their own companies — is worth celebrating.
Starting a business is an inherently optimistic endeavor. Being a founder, as Elon said, might sometimes feel like staring into an abyss, but the whole thing is anchored in a radical hope that what you’re doing will pay off.
One young founder I spoke to, Anna Monaco, started her company Paradigm at 22. She made it to Y Combinator and built a tool that now serves over 10,000 users.
“I think that anything is possible,” she told me. “Is that ridiculous? Maybe.”
Being an entrepreneur is being a human that’s fully alive.