As the AI Era Dawns, Adapting to a New Normal of Reporting to Gen Z Leadership

Think back to your early twenties.

Were you cramming for grad school exams in the library, or burning the midnight oil to meet project deadlines?

Perhaps you were polishing your resume in coffee shops, dreaming of that coveted Big Tech internship, or following the traditional path of civil service exams, all in pursuit of what everyone calls a "stable future"?

Conventional wisdom suggests that twenty-somethings should remain humble and uncertain, following well-worn paths laid out by their elders, naturally deferring to those in their forties.

Yet today's Gen Z is flipping this script entirely:

One launched a startup from his dorm room, dropped out, and built a $2 billion company within two years.

Another created the world's largest meme token platform, scaling it to a $4 billion valuation with a staggering $700 million in revenue.

Meanwhile, a fresh graduate stepped directly into the role of global marketing head at a leading crypto exchange.

These young innovators aren't waiting a decade to "pay their dues." Instead, they're claiming their spotlight right now, in their prime years. This goes beyond individual brilliance. The AI and Web3 revolution is fundamentally transforming how young people access power, build wealth, and wield influence.

In the old order, experience was the moat and age was the barrier. But in this new world, these barriers are rapidly dissolving. The tech wave has given young people another chance to seize opportunities without waiting.

With AI and crypto transforming lives, this is truly Gen Z's golden age.

The $2 Billion Unicorn Born in a Dorm Room

At 21, Brendan Foody isn't worried about hunting for internships anymore.

AI recruitment company Mercor has soared to a $2 billion valuation in just two years, boasting an impressive client roster including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Founders Fund, while generating $75 million in annual revenue. And Foody, as it turns out, is the CEO.

Back in 2021, while their peers were grappling with coursework, three 19-year-olds, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, were orchestrating a quiet revolution from their dorms at Harvard and Georgetown.

Their origin story reads like a Silicon Valley script: they first connected through high school debate circuits, clinching the national policy debate championship together. Ironically, their winning topic centered on employment market inequalities and discrimination in developing countries. This debate victory would later prove prophetic.

What started as a modest side project to learn software development and assist startups took an unexpected turn. While recruiting remote developers from India, they uncovered a golden opportunity: global talent arbitrage. India's pool of skilled developers, willing to work at competitive rates, stood in stark contrast to Silicon Valley's talent war and astronomical costs.

Their eureka moment came with the realization that talent, not software, was the real currency for startups. When ChatGPT burst onto the scene, they saw their chance: leveraging large language models to create virtual senior interviewers, automate talent evaluation, and connect employers with global talent pools.

2023 marked their official launch as they all left college to focus on Mercor. Starting as boutique recruitment intermediaries, they quickly generated $1 million in revenue with $80,000 in profit within months, manually matching AI startups with Indian engineers.

The platform soon evolved into a sophisticated AI-powered recruitment engine. Candidates now complete a 20-minute AI video interview, creating automated profiles for instant job matching. Companies simply input their requirements, and the AI serves up ideal candidates.

Their breakthrough came in 2024 when all three founders made history as the first team collectively selected for the prestigious Thiel Fellowship, Peter Thiel's program for promising young entrepreneurs. This opened doors to Silicon Valley's elite investment circles.

Their funding trajectory tells a remarkable story:

• September 2023: $3.6 million seed round

• Early 2024: $32 million Series A at $250 million valuation

• February 2025: $100 million Series B at $2 billion valuation

In an unprecedented move, Benchmark chartered a private jet to fly the founders in for Series A negotiations, a level of courtship typically reserved for established tech veterans.

Today, Mercor boasts $75 million in annual revenue with a stunning 51% monthly growth rate, serving elite clients like OpenAI. The three founders, averaging just 21 years old, have become the youngest members of the billion-dollar founders club.

Their startup culture reflects their youth-driven ethos, actively recruiting talented dropouts and maintaining an average employee age of 22. Brendan believes technological democratization has lowered barriers to entrepreneurship, making college completion optional for innovative minds.

Mercor's success story, however, is just one chapter in the larger narrative of Gen Z AI entrepreneurs:

• Jessica Wu, at age 22, left MIT to found AI agency Sola Solutions, securing $21 million from a16z

• Dang Jiacheng, who was born in 2002, created FlowGPT at Berkeley, now serving 4 million monthly active users

• Eric Steinberger began his AI research journey at 14 back in 2014, and went on to found Magic.dev, now valued at $1.5 billion

• Hong Letong, a Stanford AI mathematics prodigy, launched a pre-product company now valued between $300 million and $500 million

• Chi Guangyao transformed from liberal arts student to AI entrepreneur, building an Agent services company with $10 million in revenue from aerospace clients

One thing becomes crystal clear: Gen Z isn't just participating in the AI revolution, they're architecting it.

21-Year-Olds Build a $4 Billion Crypto Platform

While Mercor's success follows a conventional narrative, pump.fun's rise reads like a wild experiment orchestrated by Gen Z.

Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerler, all around 21 years old, co-founded what would become the world's largest meme coin launching platform.

Within a year, Pump.fun generated over $700 million in protocol revenue, with daily revenue reaching $7 million at its peak, establishing itself as one of the most profitable crypto applications.

This whirlwind began with the meme coin craze in the Solana ecosystem in early 2024.

At the time, speculators were frantically chasing the next potential 100x meme coin, but launching a token presented significant barriers: deploying contracts, configuring liquidity, and listing on exchanges. These complex and costly processes blocked countless ordinary users and grassroots creators from participating.

The pump.fun team addressed this pain point with an elegantly simple solution: a one click token launchpad.

Users simply needed to upload an image, choose a name, and pay minimal gas fees to launch a token within 5 minutes. No programming skills required, no whitepaper needed, no idealistic narrative necessary. Success depended purely on entertainment value and community buzz.

The platform implemented a Bonding Curve pricing model where token prices automatically increase with purchase volume. When a token's market cap reaches $69,000, it automatically transitions to the mainstream decentralized exchange Raydium for regular trading.

The process was designed to feel like a game: creators actively promoted their tokens to gain attention, while buyers hunted among various quirky tokens, searching for their next potential Dogecoin.

To enhance engagement, pump.fun introduced livestreaming features allowing creators to promote their coins on camera.

This quickly evolved into a surreal spectacle: creators promised extreme stunts if their tokens reached certain market caps, from head shaving to dangerous stunts. The controversy grew so intense that pump.fun eventually had to pause the livestreaming feature.

Yet pump.fun's growth remained unstoppable.

By 2025, the platform had launched over 8.7 million tokens and generated more than $700 million in revenue. In July, they secured $1.3 billion in funding at a $4 billion valuation.

However, this success story carries a darker undertone.

Data reveals that only 1.4 percent of tokens launched on pump.fun graduate to DEX listing, meaning 98.6 percent of projects ultimately become worthless. Only a small fraction of tokens maintain market caps above $100 million, while most have lifecycles measured in days or hours.

Critics describe pump.fun as an on chain casino. The platform collects a 1 percent fee from each transaction, profiting from users' excitement, dreams, and ultimately, disappointment.

The three founders maintain a low profile.

They engage on X and Discord under aliases like Sapijiju and A1on, rarely revealing their identities, primarily due to security concerns. Youth and wealth can be a dangerous combination in the crypto world. Moreover, some team members have controversial backgrounds. Vanity Fair revealed that Kerler allegedly created several rug pull projects at age 16, accumulating nearly $400,000.

Alon once shared in a podcast that most altcoins are essentially memes. They simply made this reality explicit.

Their philosophy centers on enabling everyone to become participants in the attention economy, directly converting social network engagement into financial assets.

Undeniably, this team achieved breakthrough innovation.

Through straightforward product logic and accessible design, they democratized token creation, transforming it from a technical privilege into a mass market phenomenon.

In the dynamic crypto landscape, Gen Z has emerged as the driving force. Many skip traditional investment vehicles like stocks and real estate, diving into blockchain experiments and ventures since their high school years.

Forbes reports that Barron Trump, born in 2006, has accumulated over $40 million from cryptocurrency and serves as the Web3 ambassador for family crypto initiatives.

In the crypto world, such stories have become increasingly common.

A Gen Z member quietly working from a rental apartment might become a millionaire overnight during a meme coin surge. Someone appearing to work conventionally at a state owned enterprise might secretly manage million dollar liquidity pools, treating their day job as a casual pursuit.

Wealth flows through blockchains at unprecedented speeds, increasingly finding its way to the younger generation.

Reporting to the Young Generation

Young people are stepping into leadership roles, with many already claiming executive positions.

When Gen Z and millennials skip past the edges of the conference table to take their place at its center as decision-makers, it often creates discomfort: Why them? What gives them the right?

But the reality is clear. Times have fundamentally changed.

Two recent developments in the blockchain and AI sectors signal this shift.

At just 28, Chinese American Alexandr Wang stepped into the role of Meta's Chief AI Officer, leading an elite AI team valued at $14.3 billion. In a notable turn, even 64 year old Turing Award recipient Yann LeCun now works under his direction.

Fresh out of college at 24, Claudia Wang took the helm as Bybit's Head of Marketing, steering the established exchange's brand and marketing initiatives.

Both appointments sparked intense debate.

For Alexandr, Silicon Valley veterans questioned whether a college dropout could effectively guide Meta's AI strategy, especially after he revised the development roadmap previously established by LeCun.

Yet his track record speaks volumes. Through Scale AI, Alexandr became the world's youngest self-made billionaire in 2021. His company delivers essential data labeling services to industry giants like OpenAI and Google.

Zuckerberg's $14.3 billion investment for 49% of Scale AI's equity shows remarkable confidence. It essentially amounts to acquiring a company to secure one person's talent.

For Claudia, industry insiders questioned whether a recent Gen Z graduate could handle global brand and marketing responsibilities for a major exchange like Bybit.

Her achievements tell a compelling story. She served as President of Peking University's Blockchain Association, became a Partner at Trustless Labs focusing on project incubation, helped establish StakeStone handling BD and marketing, and gained valuable experience as an investment analyst at IDG Capital.

Under her guidance, Bybit unveiled a fresh brand identity and launched the dynamic #IMakeIt marketing campaign.

Traditional corporate culture links age with experience and authority. 40 year old directors typically oversee 30 year old managers, while 50 year old vice presidents guide 35 year old supervisors.

But in today's rapidly evolving tech landscape, decade old best practices often become outdated burdens. While young leaders might have less traditional experience, they bring crucial qualities: quick learning, adaptability, and innovative thinking. They break free from conventional wisdom, pursuing innovations that traditional industries might label impossible or inappropriate.

In emerging sectors like AI and blockchain, seeing millennials and Gen Z in executive roles might become standard practice. These fields value drive over seniority, with investors and founders often preferring energetic young talent over experienced but cautious veterans.

And we, the older generation, will need to adapt to this new normal: reporting to the younger generation.