Kevin Hurts tends to be the first through the door. In 2001, he co-founded Xoom. Those were the days when you had to wait in line at Western Union to send money across the border. The company went public in 2013, and PayPal paid $1.1 billion for it in 2015. Four years after launching Xoom, he co-founded Eventbrite. Eventbrite went public in 2018, making it possible to purchase event tickets without throwing your laptop into the ocean.
After working at Founders Fund, Hertz co-founded his own venture firm, A* Capital (An homage to computer science algorithms), and in 2020 discovered another trend before the masses: the SPAC boom. His blank check company One acquired 3D printing company Markforged in a $2.1 billion reverse merger in 2021. Just as other Silicon Valley financiers suddenly decided that SPACs were the future.
Currently, Hertz is working on: It's teenage founders, not as a social experiment, but as an unplanned investment theory. His company recently wrote a check to Aaru, an AI-powered prediction engine. One of the founders was too young to get a driver's license at the time. Mr. Harts is by no means alone in this. The drop-out-and-build movement, made most famous by founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, is becoming a standard lifestyle choice for certain ambitious kids.
Consider Corey Levy, who interned at Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures, and Techstars while in high school and bailed out to the University of Illinois after his freshman year. He currently runs Z Fellows. Z Fellows is a week-long accelerator that awards $10,000 grants to tech founders (including high school students). When Levy dropped out 10 years ago, Thiel Fellowship was a radically new idea. Currently, “the number of dropouts is at an all-time high,” he told Business Insider last spring. “If you look around the table at a large group dinner of 15 or 20 people, you won't find anyone with a college degree.”
It's becoming enough of a “happening” that accelerator Y Combinator, which has quietly reinforced dropout culture since its inception, recently launched a program designed for students who want to start a business but don't want to drop out. This program allows students to apply while in school, receive immediate approval and funding, and defer attending YC until after graduation. (This move is very on-brand for YC, which is known for its counterculture culture.)
Not surprisingly, TechCrunch has covered this trend. See here, here, and here. But if you want to learn more, we'll be speaking with Hartz at the StrictlyVC event at TechCrunch's fun Disrupt show, which kicks off in San Francisco on Monday, October 27th (Hartz will speak on Tuesday, October 28th).
In the meantime, here are excerpts from Friday's chat where we started thinking about this topic.
tech crunch event
San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025
TC: We've always seen teenagers founding companies, but it certainly feels like it's happening more than ever, and you tell me this is happening behind the scenes. Why do you think that is?
Kevin Hartz: There are really bright kids out there who are just really bored in school. I see freshman and sophomore classes at Stanford fall into this category. They were completely bored and some even quit homeschooling and excelled. Even at top universities, there are still people who enroll and drop out with a passion to build, learn, and push boundaries. There was one company whose founders were 18, 18, and 15 years old. I think the CTO is probably 16 years old now, but he was 15 when we helped him. But it's not that unusual.
How are Z Fellows different from the Thiel Fellowship, which was launched by Peter Thiel several years ago?
Incredibly similar. The difference is that Thiel Fellowship is a nonprofit organization, and while I'm a big fan of Peter's, as a nonprofit organization it may not be as committed. corey [has] just [been] Z Fellows has been building over the last few years and it's a really great program. This also shows that Peter is ahead of his time and sees value in the irony of offering money to drop out. This phenomenon is growing and getting stronger, and no one knows how long it will last, especially given the cost of college and the fact that many see poorly managed universities as toxic environments. All of this can lead teens to wonder, “Why not just drop out and start a family?”
Will Z Fellows acquire stock in companies?
They offer a very small check – $10,000. And there is a fund that will help people in the future. But it's mostly a $10,000 initial piece with no obligation. I think Cory will pick a few people to spend $100,000 on pre-seed. [rounds]too.
What do you think about the statistics we're seeing related to kids leaving school without a job? I can't help but think that part of this feeling is driven by the realization that there may not be a job waiting for them when they graduate.
Another phenomenon is occurring. This reversal should occur in 26 or 27, when there are more 1099s than W-2s. That means 30 years ago, people worked for big companies like Nestlé, McKinsey, and IBM. Now they are working for themselves. They trade cryptocurrencies and build their own businesses. It shows American individualism. It's as if America is going into entrepreneurial hyperdrive.
I think it's because people want to start companies, but I also think that because of the efficiencies created by things like AI, more people are being forced out of their roles and having to start companies.
Something Paul Graham said many years ago has stuck with me. That's both a good thing and a bad thing for young founders when their startup takes off. Because it controls their life. You were a young entrepreneur. How do you feel about funding a 15-year-old knowing that his company may be doing very well, but that person may not have the ability to experience what most 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds experience?
It proved to be an exhilarating experience, but it was punctuated by painful challenges. Highlight everything. And that's a good point. [Seventeen,] It was a time when fearless Marines were sent into battle. Maybe there's something about that era that makes people drive so hard. However, given the recentness of this phenomenon, it may be too early to understand its meaning.
We're just at the beginning of what I call a super cycle of technology expansion with AI and everything else, especially AI. We are in a very early innings. OpenAI and Anthropic are growing incredibly quickly in their underlying model parts. Now we all start working on the application layer. We have co-pilots in coding like Cognition, and Decagon and Sierra in the AI CRM space. But there are many other categories that have yet to be disrupted. Even Sierra and Decagon are in the very early stages of their mission.
You have daughters. Do you want to see them go to college? How would you feel if they said, “Dad, I want to start something now instead of going to college.''
Our 17-year-old son is currently applying to college. She wants a college experience. She wants that taste of life. She didn't question it at all. I tried to give her as many opportunities as possible to consider alternatives. I plan to do the same for my 13-year-old son, who will be competing next.
How many bets do you think you made last year involved teenagers?
It's close to 20%.
What would you have said two years ago?
Approximately 5%.