The 20-somethings are swarming San Francisco's AI boom

Straits Times

14 hours ago

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The entrepreneurs are part of a fast-growing cohort of chief executives in their 20s who have flocked to San Francisco's AI boom.
SAN FRANCISCO – Mr Brendan Foody had just finished his sophomore year at Georgetown University in 2023 when he dropped out to jump into the artificial intelligence fray in San Francisco.
Mr Karun Kaushik dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that year to move to California after constructing an AI tool in his dorm room. And Mr Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, who was traveling the world after high school, had the same idea in 2022.
Now Mr Foody, 22, Mr Kaushik, 21, and Mr Carmichael-Jack, 23, are each running AI startups within a 30-minute walk of one another in San Francisco. They have raised millions of dollars for their businesses and are supervising dozens of employees. They all have a dream that their companies will make it big.
'When ChatGPT came out, it was so clear to me that this is obviously going to be a paradigm shift,' said Mr Carmichael-Jack, the chief executive of Artisan, which makes an AI sales assistant and has raised more than US$35 million (S$45 million) in funding. 'I knew I wanted to be involved in that.'
The entrepreneurs are part of a fast-growing cohort of chief executives in their 20s who have flocked to San Francisco's AI boom.
Among others, there are also Mr Scott Wu, 28, of Cognition AI, which makes a software coding assistant; Mr Michael Truell, 24, of Cursor, which sells an AI code editor; and Mr Roy Lee, 21, of Cluely, an AI software startup. Perhaps the most prominent is Mr Alexandr Wang, 28, who led the startup Scale AI before Meta tapped him in June to run its new superintelligence lab.
Their growing ranks have injected a dose of youthful elan to the AI frenzy, which has been dominated by longtime tech giants like Google and Nvidia and decade-old startups like OpenAI.
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Many of the entrepreneurs know one another from college or startup incubators like Y Combinator. Work is often at the centre of their lives – founders have to grind, after all – but they also host ping-pong nights, play poker together and meet up at networking events in the city. Venture capitalists are adding to the new blood with intensive startup programs geared to high school and college students.
It's part of a well-worn pattern in which droves of young hopefuls are drawn to the nation's tech capital by a promising technology, much as 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and his friends did in the mid-2000s when they showed up in Silicon Valley with Facebook. Mr Zuckerberg, now 41, dropped out of Harvard.
'When you have these big technology waves, the whole chessboard changes and everything is up for grabs,' said Mr Saam Motamedi, an investor at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Greylock's San Francisco office recently hosted four 19-year-olds who are working on a 'stealth' artificial intelligence startup, he said, though the teenagers have since moved into their own space.
Mr Pete Koomen, a general partner at Y Combinator, said the median age of the San Francisco incubator's most recent cohort of participants this year was 24, down from 30 in 2022.
'This is a group of largely young founders that have picked up everything and moved and gone all in on a crazy dream,' he said. 'They're all in close proximity with each other. They're helping each other out. They're competing with each other. It just creates this incredible energy.'
Mr Foody runs Mercor, which provides automatic screening of resumes and AI job interviews. He established the company with two high school friends from San Jose, California, Mr Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath. Mr Midha, 22, is Mercor's chief operating officer and Mr Hiremath, 22, the chief technology officer.
In February, they raised US$100 million, bringing Mercor's total funding to more than US$132 million and valuing the startup at US$2 billion. Investors include the venture capital firms General Catalyst and Benchmark.
As Mercor flourished, it hired 150 employees in San Francisco and India. The startup is outgrowing its current space, which has a ping-pong table and dog cages dedicated to office pets, and is preparing to move into a bigger office nearby.
Mr Midha said there was a sense of 'extreme urgency' and 'existential dread' among his peers who felt that now was the time to start an AI company. It 'just felt crazy not to go all in' on Mercor, he added.
Mercor has already spawned other young chief executives. Ms Rithika Kacham, 22, who dropped out of Stanford during her senior year in 2024 to join Mercor as Foody's executive assistant, started her own company, Verita AI, in May.
Her company hires professionals in various fields to help train AI models to recognise images more accurately, such as an intellectual property expert to help AI determine whether a Mickey Mouse cartoon is real.
'It's kind of this AI inflection point where it felt like almost everyone I knew at Stanford was dropping out to cofound a company,' said Ms Kacham, who was majoring in computer science and product design and is trying to raise money for Verita.
To cut through the crowd, some of the young leaders have tried to go viral. In November, Mr Carmichael-Jack's Artisan plastered ads across bus stops in San Francisco with the outrage-inducing directive to 'stop hiring humans' and instead 'hire' the startup's AI sales agent, Ava.
People were 'shocked' by the marketing campaign because it tapped into fears that AI would replace humans, Mr Carmichael-Jack said, but it also 'made them intrigued about what we were doing'.
Mr Kaushik, the chief executive of Delve, a startup that automates the compliance busywork for businesses dealing with sensitive data, founded the company with his MIT classmate Selin Kocalar, 21.
'I don't think about age,' Ms Kocalar said. 'In today's day and age, the barrier to entry is so low with the help of AI.'
Soon they may be mingling with an even younger crowd.
A billboard in San Francisco on April 28, 2025, announcing Artisan's fund-raising this year.
PHOTO: CAROLYN FONG/NYTIMES
On a recent Friday in Fort Mason, a converted military hub in the city, the venture capital firm Founders Inc held a summer programme for high schoolers and college students to nurture their startup ideas.
Long tables were covered in wires and open boxes of crackers, with some teenagers clustered together tweaking robots while others took a break to play videos games.
Among the attendees was Mr Mizan Rupan-Tompkins, 18, a rising sophomore at San Jose State University who is studying computer science but pausing school in 2026 to build an AI-powered device to help unmanned air traffic control towers land airplanes safely.
His company, Stratus AI, just got an investment from Founders Inc, which he declined to detail. Founders Inc, which also declined to share the investment amount, typically writes checks of US$100,000 to US$250,000 for startups.
'Stuff moves so quickly' that he could not wait until he'd graduate in 2028 to build a company, Mr Rupan-Tompkins said.
'It's better to be earlier than later, just in case I missed some type of wave,' he said. NYTIMES