Middle-aged and older managers need to get used to reporting work to post-2000s employees
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Middle-aged and older managers need to get used to reporting work to post-2000s employees
In the AI era, Generation Z will be the main players.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Liam, TechFlow
What were you doing in your early twenties?
Were you studying hard in the library for graduate school entrance exams, or pulling all-nighters in the lab to finish reports?
Were you editing your resume at a coffee shop, hoping for an internship at a big tech firm, or being pressured by your parents to take civil service exams in pursuit of a "stable" life?
In most people's eyes, twenty-somethings should be humble and lost, obedient to experience and authority, accustomed to bowing before 40-year-old middle-aged professionals.
Yet on the other end, some Gen Zs are rewriting the script:
Some dropped out of college to start companies from their dorm rooms, reaching $2 billion valuations within two years;
Others built the world’s largest meme launchpad, valued at $4 billion with over $700 million in revenue;
Some recent graduates have already become marketing leads at top-tier exchanges.
They didn’t endure “ten years of grunt work,” but instead stepped directly into the spotlight at their most ambitious age. This isn't random genius—AI and Web3 are reshaping young people’s relationship with power, wealth, and influence.
In the old order, seniority was a moat and age a barrier, but in this new world, those advantages are rapidly eroding. Technological waves are giving youth another chance—one that doesn’t require waiting.
AI and crypto are changing destinies. This is the golden era for Gen Z.
The $2 Billion Unicorn Born in a Dorm Room
Brendan Foody is just 21 years old, but he no longer worries about landing internships.
Mercor, the AI recruiting company he leads as CEO, has reached a valuation exceeding $2 billion within two years, counting OpenAI, Anthropic, and Founders Fund among its clients, with annual revenue hitting $75 million.
In 2021, while most sophomores were struggling through coursework, three 19-year-olds—Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha—were plotting a “revolution” from their dorm rooms at Harvard and Georgetown.
Their meeting was dramatic—they met on a high school debate team, formed a trio, won the U.S. National Policy Debate Championship, where coincidentally, the topic they debated centered around labor market inequities, particularly employment discrimination in developing countries.
Fate may have intervened—this debate became the seed for their future startup.
Initially, they only wanted a small side project to quickly learn software development and help startups. But when hiring remote developers from India, they spotted a massive opportunity: global talent distribution is highly uneven, creating enormous arbitrage potential.
For example, there are many skilled, low-cost technical talents in places like India who remain overlooked, while Silicon Valley talent is concentrated but expensive and fiercely competitive.
They soon realized that for startups, people matter more than software.
At the same time, ChatGPT launched, sparking a new idea: use large language models to simulate experienced interviewers, automatically assess talent, and help employers break geographical barriers to find the best candidates.
In 2023, all three dropped out of college and officially founded Mercor.
In its early days, Mercor operated as a manual recruitment agency, connecting AI startups with remote engineers from India—a model that generated $1 million in revenue and $80,000 in profit within months.
Soon after, Mercor evolved into a fully AI-driven recruitment platform. Job seekers upload their resumes and complete a 20-minute video interview with an AI system, which then builds a personal profile and matches them to suitable roles. Companies simply submit job descriptions, and the AI recommends top candidates.
In 2024, all three founders were selected for the Thiel Fellowship—the prestigious Silicon Valley program established by investor Peter Thiel specifically for students who drop out to pursue startups. They became the first founding team ever admitted collectively, gaining not only financial backing but crucial access to elite venture capital circles.
From there, fundraising accelerated like a rocket launch.
September 2023: $3.6 million seed round;
Early 2024: $32 million Series A at a $250 million valuation;
February 2025: $100 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation.
In less than two years, the company’s valuation increased eightfold.
Even more astonishingly, top-tier VC firm Benchmark chartered a private jet to fly the three founders in for their Series A negotiation—an honor usually reserved for “superstar” startups, nearly unimaginable in traditional industries.
Today, Mercor generates $75 million in annual revenue with a monthly growth rate of 51%. Its client list includes leading global AI labs such as OpenAI.
Three founders with an average age of 21 have become the youngest members of the billionaire club.
Mercor also fosters a unique startup culture—hiring heavily from talented dropouts of similar age, resulting in a workforce with an average age of just 22, forming a dynamic and energetic team. Brendan believes startup barriers are far lower now; more young people are choosing innovation and hands-on practice over completing college step-by-step.
Mercor’s dorm-room origin story is merely the tip of the iceberg of Gen Z AI entrepreneurship.
Jessica Wu, a 22-year-old Chinese-American, dropped out of MIT to found Sola Solutions, an AI agent company that raised $21 million from investors including a16z;
Dang Jiacheng, born in 2002, left his second year at Berkeley to launch FlowGPT, building the world’s largest AI prompt community with over 4 million monthly active users; Eric Steinberger, born in 2000, began AI research at age 14, collaborated with Meta researchers during high school, later founded Magic.dev, secured $465 million in funding, and achieved a $1.5 billion valuation;
There’s also Hong Letong, a Gen Z Stanford PhD focused on “AI math + quantitative finance,” whose company was pre-valued at $300–500 million before even launching a product; and Chi Guangyao from Yuke Technology, who transitioned from humanities to AI Agent enterprise services, achieving nearly ten million yuan in annual revenue with clients including China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.
A clear picture emerges: in the AI era, Gen Z will be the main characters.
21-Year-Olds Building a $4 Billion Crypto Platform
If Mercor’s success represents a disciplined, well-trained “mainstream narrative,” then pump.fun’s rise feels more like a wild experiment orchestrated entirely by Gen Z.
Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerler—averaging just 21 years old—co-founded the world’s largest Meme coin issuance platform.
In just one year, Pump.fun generated over $700 million in protocol revenue, with single-day peaks surpassing $7 million, briefly becoming the most profitable crypto application.
The storm began with Solana’s explosive Meme coin frenzy in early 2024.
Speculators were chasing the next “100x Meme coin,” but launching a token wasn’t easy: deploying contracts, setting up liquidity pools, listing on exchanges—the process was complex and costly, locking out countless regular users and grassroots creators.
The pump.fun team saw this pain point and offered a brutally simple solution: one-click token creation.
Users simply upload an image, name their token, pay a few dollars in gas fees, and can launch a token within five minutes. No coding skills, no whitepaper, no lofty vision required—just something fun or attention-grabbing to attract buyers.
The platform uses a pricing mechanism called a "bonding curve," where token prices automatically rise with purchases. When a token reaches a market cap of $69,000, it automatically "graduates" to Raydium, a major decentralized exchange, for open trading.
The entire process is gamified: creators must actively promote or hype their tokens to gain visibility, while buyers hunt across bizarre and creative tokens for the next Dogecoin.
To boost engagement, pump.fun added live streaming, allowing creators to pitch their tokens on camera.
This quickly turned into a surreal spectacle: one creator promised to shave his head if the token hit $1 million; another set himself on fire live—all generating controversy, eventually forcing pump.fun to temporarily disable livestreaming.
Despite the backlash, pump.fun’s expansion remained unstoppable.
By 2025, the platform had launched over 8.7 million tokens and accumulated over $700 million in revenue; in July, it raised $1.3 billion at a $4 billion valuation...
But this success has a dark side.
Data shows only 1.4% of tokens launched on pump.fun successfully "graduate" to DEXs—meaning 98.6% ultimately go to zero. Only a handful of tokens maintain market caps above $100 million, while most live for mere days or hours.
To critics, pump.fun is nothing more than a “casino on-chain.” It earns 1% fees on every transaction, profiting from users’ excitement, fantasies, and inevitable disappointment.
The three founders behind the platform remain deliberately anonymous.
They operate under pseudonyms like Sapijiju and A1on on X and Discord, rarely showing their faces—primarily for safety reasons. Being young and suddenly wealthy is the most dangerous label in crypto. Worse, some members have controversial pasts: according to Vanity Fair, Kerler created multiple rug-pull scams at age 16, cashing out nearly $400,000.
Alon once stated on a podcast: “Most altcoins are本质上 memes. We’re just making that explicit.”
Their philosophy? Turn everyone into a node in the “attention economy,” transforming online emotions directly into financial assets.
Undeniably, the team pulled off a disruptive innovation.
With simple product logic and barrier-breaking design, they redefined what it means to “launch a token”—transforming it from a privilege of experts into a game for the masses.
In the wild west of crypto, Gen Z reigns supreme. Many skip traditional investment paths like stocks and real estate altogether, diving into on-chain experiments and adventures as early as high school—or even younger.
According to Forbes, Barron Trump, born in 2006, has already earned over $40 million from cryptocurrency and now serves as the Web3 ambassador for his family’s crypto initiatives.
In crypto circles, such stories are no longer rare.
A Gen Z kid living in a rental apartment, seen by neighbors as “unemployed and wasting time,” might become a millionaire overnight amid the Memecoin craze; someone quietly working in a state-owned enterprise could secretly be an anonymous whale managing multi-million-dollar funds—the office job just a side gig...
Wealth is circulating faster than ever on blockchains, increasingly flowing into the hands of the young generation.
Reporting to the Young
Some young people are becoming bosses; others are already stepping into executive roles.
When Gen Z and Millennials bypass the corners of the conference table and stride straight to the center—to become the ones giving orders—many feel deeply uncomfortable: Why? On what basis?
But adults, times have truly changed.
Recently, two headlines in the blockchain and AI worlds emerged almost simultaneously, signaling to all: a new era has arrived.
Alexandr Wang, 28, became Meta’s Chief AI Officer, commanding a $14.3 billion empire and overseeing even 64-year-old Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, who now reports to him.
Claudia Wang, 24, fresh out of college, was appointed Head of Marketing at Bybit, a globally renowned exchange, leading brand and marketing strategy for this veteran platform.
Both faced skepticism.
For 28-year-old Alexandr, criticism came mainly from Silicon Valley’s old guard: Can a dropout really lead AI strategy at a giant like Meta? He even overturned the development roadmap previously set by Turing laureate LeCun.
But results speak louder: Alexandr founded Scale AI, which made him the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by 2021. His company provides critical data labeling services to top AI labs like OpenAI and Google.
To get Wang, Zuckerberg spent $14.3 billion acquiring 49% of Scale AI—a true case of “buying an entire company for one person.”
For Claudia, doubts arose within the industry: Can a recent Gen Z graduate really lead global branding and marketing for a major exchange like Bybit?
Beyond age, her track record speaks volumes: former president of Peking University Blockchain Association, partner at Trustless Labs involved in project incubation, founding member at StakeStone handling BD and marketing, plus analyst experience at top-tier dollar fund IDG Capital.
Under Claudia’s leadership, Bybit launched a new brand identity and the #IMakeIt marketing campaign.
In traditional corporate culture, age often equals experience and seniority, which in turn symbolizes authority. A 40-year-old director should naturally manage a 30-year-old manager; a 50-year-old VP should unquestionably guide a 35-year-old supervisor.
But in an era of rapid technological iteration, yesterday’s “best practices” may today be “legacy burdens.” While young people lack conventional experience, they possess something more valuable: learning speed, adaptability, and innovative capacity. They aren’t bound by “this is how it’s done” thinking and dare to attempt innovations deemed “impossible” or “inappropriate” by traditional industries.
In fields like AI and blockchain, it will gradually become normal for Millennials and Gen Z to leapfrog into executive roles. In these domains, drive matters more than seniority. Compared to complacent middle-aged professionals, energetic young leaders are increasingly favored by investors and founders alike.
And we “middle-aged pros,” must learn to accept this new reality: reporting to the young.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
深潮TechFlow
