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Gen Z Founders: Writing A New Playbook For Business
Gen Z Founders: Writing A New Playbook For Business
Gen Z entrepreneurs are launching fewer ventures than prior generations but the companies they are starting are distinctly different. Today's emerging entrepreneurs are helping to solve problems they have direct experience with, merging profit with purpose from day one, using AI tools that didn't exist even a year ago, and becoming successful at a remarkably young age. Fundamentally, Gen Z founders are writing a new playbook for business that's based on making money in ways that reflect what's important to them.
Research consistently shows Gen Z's desire to drive social impact through work. For example, 89% of Gen Z respondents in Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z survey said that a sense of purpose is important to their job and entrepreneurial ambitions. 'Gen Z tends to support and start businesses that align with their values, focusing on community betterment,' said serial entrepreneur Dave Liniger in Forbes. This contrasts with older generations, who have placed more emphasis on profit, or traditional career goals with purpose often a secondary consideration.
A new wave of young founders is proving that this generation knows how to create successful businesses that combine profit with impact. Here are three inspiring examples of young people who have achieved a remarkable degree of success without compromising their values.
Mikaila Ulmer, founder of Me & the Bees Lemonade, started at age four with a honey-sweetened recipe and a mission to protect pollinators. Today her product is sold in over 1,500 U.S. stores, with a portion of profits funding bee conservation.
Ben Pasternak, founder of Simulate (maker of plant-based 'NUGGS'), raised over $50 million before turning 23, aiming to reinvent fast food in a sustainable way.
Emma Rogue, founder of Rogue, turned a vintage clothing shop into a cultural hub for Gen Z creatives, merging retail with experiential community events.
What unites them is not just youth, but a shared belief that business can solve real problems for people and the planet. 'Conscious consumption is not a trend, it's a lifestyle choice and more and more consumers are aligning with that methodology,' said Rogue.
I wanted to know more about what's important to Gen Z entrepreneurs and how they are building businesses that truly reflect their values. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Augustus Holm, a 19-year-old founder whose story captures many of Gen Z's defining entrepreneurial traits. Holm is the founder of CheckRx, a healthcare startup that is making Medicare coverage simple and helping seniors save money. Holm is also the founder of Youth Philanthropy Council, California's largest 'kid-run non-profit', an organization that has already raised more than $3.3 million for healthcare and education equity.
Holm's journey started at home in his parent's kitchen. When he was 13 he started helping his grandmother, who was a Medicare agent, look up prescription coverage in massive 500-page binders. Holm then found a way to digitize the process, first with searchable PDFs, then Excel spreadsheets, and finally a system that pulled real-time data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. This became the prototype for CheckRx.
CheckRx serves both Medicare agents and seniors. The agent-facing platform follows a SaaS model, cutting average plan-comparison work from 233 hours a year to just six. The seniors-facing tool will be free, funded by health plan partnerships, so that older adults can choose the right coverage, and save money, at no cost.
Holm stressed that CheckRx is more than a comparison tool. Holm calls it 'a general Medicare AI assistant' that automates everything from compliance training to scheduling. A new upgrade will reduce many agents' workload to a single hour a year, freeing them to focus on what Holm says they enjoy most: building relationships with clients.
Holm's early misstep involved launching the senior tool first without a sustainable revenue model and led to an important pivot: build for agents first, then expand to seniors once the infrastructure and funding model were in place.
In an age where AI often replaces human touch, Holm is using it to increase the time that agents spend with seniors. 'Agents love being able to talk to seniors, they love the human part. We do the boring stuff. and let them focus on the people.' For seniors, many of whom are isolated, that human connection matters as much as the health plan itself.
Holm shared the story of a man managing prescription plans for ten relatives who, in a two-minute CheckRx session, found a new plan that cut costs dramatically for his family and offered grocery stipends. 'When he saw how fast it was, having experienced it himself as just a normal person trying to help out their family, it was so cool to see his face light up.'
The same year he began building CheckRx, Holm founded the Youth Philanthropy Council. At 13, he and his friends raised $15,000 for a San Diego community health clinic by selling yearbooks. 'We were able to help them to buy some new equipment when we were in sixth grade,' said Holm. The next year, they raised over $130,000. Since then Youth Philanthropy Council has raised $3.3 million, much of it influenced by Holm's experience in the healthcare space.
'The Youth Philanthropy Council and CheckRx started around the same time when I was 13 and volunteered in health clinics at the same time as building this platform for my grandma. While I was volunteering I started asking seniors how they enrolled in Medicare and found that most people were paying too much and didn't even know what coverage they had.'
People often treat age like a liability, but Holm believes it's one of the biggest assets a young founder has. 'We're close to the problems, we move fast, and we're not stuck doing things the way they've always been done,' said Holm. 'We're ambitious enough to believe we can do anything, and just naive enough to try. That mix, a little delusion and a lot of drive, is what pushes innovation forward.'
Similar to other young entrepreneurs, Holm's approach to business is based on four principles that can also apply to leaders of any age:
Gen Z entrepreneurs like Augustus Holm, Mikaila Ulmer, and Ben Pasternak are acting early, iterating fast, and ensuring that purpose and profit aren't mutually exclusive.
Holm has recently chosen to keep building CheckRx instead of selling for an acquisition offer of $12 million because he believes in the company's purpose and in the team around him. Few entrepreneurs of any age, let alone a 19 year old, would resist an offer like this but Gen Z founders are different and their potential is unlimited.
