On Friday, the Wall Street Journal published an article about AI entrepreneurs dropping out of college and being supported by venture capitalists. I’m a little worried about them:
“While young founders have long dropped out of college to chase startup dreams during past technological booms, this time, their financial backers are funding housing for them and ensuring their daily needs, from changing sheets, taking out the trash and booking travel, are met.”
There’s a lot of VC money blowing this way and that right now in the tech world, and this article is about the latest crop of young people who think they’re capable enough to absorb some of it while they have the youth and vitality to do so—which is perfectly understandable. This time, however, founders sense a “short window of opportunity” to create their various unicorns before something like the dawn of AGI happens, ostensibly. And VCs sound like they’re encouraging that perception, and doing everything short of wiping their butts for them to make sure they build quickly.
That perception of a ticking clock gives me flashbacks to other Wall Street Journal articles about tech incubators during boom periods. Here’s a quote from one from 2010 about something called i/o Ventures:
Incubators typically help nurture small businesses by providing space, services and mentorship to entrepreneurs, often for a fee or an equity stake in their business. Well-known incubators include Y Combinator and Plug and Play Tech Center, with many venture-capital firms also incubating start-ups. [One entrepreneur] says incubators can have downsides—he notes some try to exert too much control, while others are geared to younger entrepreneurs who are fresh out of college—he is exploring i/o ventures because he hasn’t raised any funding and is looking for camaraderie with other start-up founders.
The headline for that article was “Start-Up Incubators Reborn,” because at the time, incubators were a throwback to the dot-com bubble days. In 2010, people were making apps, but like the dot-com era, the app era ended too.
In the AI era, the young people are even younger, the article (which doesn’t use the word “incubator”) says. “The average age of founders of so-called AI unicorns—companies worth more than $1 billion—has fallen from 40 in 2020 to 29 in 2024, according to investment firm Antler,” the Journal notes.
One 21-year-old founder of a defense tech company:
[…] lives in a house with 10 of his employees in San Francisco’s Twin Peaks neighborhood, where investor money pays the rent, for a personal chef, a house cleaner and someone to make sure the trash gets taken out and the fridge is stocked with LaCroix. It also paid for them to convert the garage into a gym and add a cold plunge pool to the deck, changes that help ensure they can work 15 hours per day, seven days per week, and to rarely leave the house.
One of the homes features a “den mother”—actually the VC’s office manager—who says of the future billionaires she cleans up after, “I’d do anything for them.” The Journal notes that “a happy birthday sign from months earlier still hangs on the wall of the fraternity brothers’ apartment and a leftover keg lingers in the building basement.”
“My worst-case scenario is going back to Harvard, which isn’t a worse-case scenario at all,” says one 19-year-old entrepreneur quoted in the article.
“I don’t think you necessarily need college anymore,” says another 19-year-old quoted in the article.
We tend to put on our survivorship bias glasses when we read about startups. Most startups go nowhere, of course. And callow, college-aged tech entrepreneurs getting write-ups in the Wall Street Journal are a tradition dating back to at least the year 2000. But I sort of think the latest ones think AGI is going to come soon and take out their trash for them for the rest of their lives, even after their den mothers move on. And that troubles me a bit.
