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Business Insider
05-08-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
I raised $25 million at 23. Here's my advice to other Gen Z entrepreneurs.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the 23-year-old CEO of Artisan. It's been edited for length and clarity. When I was 7, I had a candy shop in my bedroom. It wasn't really a company, but we technically made revenue. When I was 13, I started buying and reselling domains. I didn't even apply to any universities. I knew in high school I wasn't going to go. I started an app for booking cleaners after finishing high school in London. It turned out to be a terrible, tarpit idea, but I learned a lot about how to build a company and how not to build a company. I founded Artisan when I was 21 At the beginning of 2023, I came up with Artisan. In January 2023, I spent a couple of months trying to find a cofounder and building the company. It was like a failed engine. I interviewed 100 cofounders, and didn't find anyone particularly good. In August 2023, I got another wave of motivation. It moved pretty fast then, and I got very lucky early on. Within the first month, we had a very basic prototype. We managed to raise $1.75 million just from a LinkedIn message. People are always like, "How did you raise money so early on?" That's complete luck. We got into Y Combinator a week after that. We launched V0 of Artisan in 2024, but the product barely worked. In June of last year, we launched V0.1, and that's when we started to see some growth. Our $12 million seed round was wrapped up in August, when I was 22. We raised a Series A that we closed in Q1 of this year at $25 million, which has enabled us to build out the team and hire a lot of really great talent and to double down on product again. We now have $6 million in annual recurring revenue. My advice for Gen Z tech entrepreneurs There's a relatively built-out playbook you can follow. First of all, educate yourself on the space and understand the type of company that you're building, how to build it, but then more broadly, what the startup ecosystem looks like. Do everything you can to be in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem, rather than whatever town or city you're from. If I tried to raise that first round of funding in London, I probably would've gotten $100,000 or $200,000, a terrible valuation. We were able to raise a $15 million valuation with no products and just an idea because we went down the SF route, rather than the European route. You really need to have a strong founding team. I don't have a degree, and I've never had a job. Finding someone who can help with whatever you're weak at is super important. Reading high-quality books and watching Y Combinator videos helped me early on. "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel — he has some questionable opinions beyond the book, but that's a really good one. "Principles" by Ray Dalio and "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries are really strong. People also don't go all in. They'll dip their toe in. Especially when you're early on, you need to make the company your life. You should be working 80+ hours a week and moving to San Francisco. That's what I didn't do in January 2023, and it's the reason I had the false start. I was doing it for 30-40 hours a week, and it never got the momentum it needed. I did it differently in August. Raising funding is really difficult if you don't have experience. You have to put yourself in positions to get lucky. Meet the right people, network. Build a credible story and look like you're going to succeed. The most important thing is building a product that people want. If you do that, you don't even need to fundraise or have a great team. Here's how Gen Z founders are different from their predecessors There's more of an approach of doing whatever you need to do to get attention with younger founders. We were part of it with our controversial billboard campaign. Times Square billboard for AI company sparks backlash for calling for human workers to be replaced by AI. 'Stop Hiring Humans. AI employees are here.' — Oli London (@OliLondonTV) June 22, 2025 Young people are just more willing to do what they need to get eyeballs. The biggest AI companies now are foundation models. You couldn't really do that well as a Gen Zer, because you don't have the experience. I think we're going to see that shift pretty dramatically over the years, as product layer becomes more relevant and the foundation models mature. You've already seen it with Cursor. They're above $500 million ARR now. There's a bunch of other stories like that emerging. This is where younger founders will start to shine more, when the app layer pushes through.
Business Insider
22-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
The '10x engineer' is old news. Surge's CEO says '100x engineers' are here.
As the Silicon Valley saying goes, the "10x engineer" is capable of producing 10 times the work of their colleagues, developing projects and writing code at a quicker pace. In the age of AI, a top-end engineer's multiplier is itself getting a multiplier, according to Surge CEO Edwin Chen. Chen boot-strapped his way to $1 billion in revenue. The CEO of Surge self-funded his company, taking no VC money — though he's now reportedly looking to raise up to an additional $1 billion in capital. On the 20VC podcast, he said a 100x engineer is now possible — and could help lean startups reach new heights. "Already you have a lot of these single-person startups that are already doing $10 million in revenue," Chen said. "If AI is adding all this efficiency, then yeah, I can definitely see this multiplying 100x to get to this $1 billion single-person company." Efficiency gains can be vital to startups looking to stay lean. Chen said that Surge was already "so much more efficient" than its peer companies like Scale AI, Surge's biggest data labeling rival, which reportedly brought in $870 million in 2024 after multiple rounds of funding. Chen also said that Surge's lack of a sales or PR team helped keep it lean. While the "10x engineer" dates back to a 1968 study about programming performance, the term was later popularized among Silicon Valley executives. In his book "Zero to One," Peter Thiel coined the "10x improvement" rule, claiming that startups needed to improve on existing alternatives by a factor of ten. Chen is a believer in the " 10x engineer." Some are 2-3x faster at coding, or work 2-3x harder, or have 2-3x less side tasks, he said. Multiplied together, engineers can reach 10x productivity. "2-3x is often actually an understatement," Chen said. "I know people who literally are five times more productive coders than anybody else." The advent of generative AI and coding tools supercharges Chen's math: "Add in all the AI efficiencies that you get. You just multiply all those things out and you get to 100," he said. Agentic AI coding tools have taken over much of software engineering, writing code for developers, sometime with minimal human editing necessary. But these tools still need a prompt, which Chen said makes them most useful to those who have high-level ideas.
Business Insider
22-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
The '10x engineer' is old news. Surge's CEO says '100x engineers' are here.
A "10x engineer" isn't cool anymore. You know what's cool? A "100x engineer." As the Silicon Valley saying goes, the "10x engineer" is capable of producing 10 times the work of their colleagues, developing projects and writing code at a quicker pace. In the age of AI, a top-end engineer's multiplier is itself getting a multiplier, according to Surge CEO Edwin Chen. Chen boot-strapped his way to $1 billion in revenue. The CEO of Surge self-funded his company, taking no VC money — though he's now reportedly looking to raise up to an additional $1 billion in capital. On the 20VC podcast, he said a "100x engineer" is now possible — and could help lean startups reach new heights. "Already you have a lot of these single-person startups that are already doing $10 million in revenue," Chen said. "If AI is adding all this efficiency, then yeah, I can definitely see this multiplying 100x to get to this $1 billion single-person company." Efficiency gains can be vital to startups looking to stay lean. Chen said that Surge was already "so much more efficient" than its peer companies like Scale AI, Surge's biggest data labeling rival, which reportedly brought in $870 million in 2024 after multiple rounds of funding. Chen also said that Surge's lack of a sales or PR team helped keep it lean. While the "10x engineer" dates back to a 1968 study about programming performance, the term was later popularized among Silicon Valley executives. In his book "Zero to One," Peter Thiel coined the "10x improvement" rule, claiming that startups needed to improve on existing alternatives by a factor of ten. Chen is a believer in the " 10x engineer." Some are 2-3x faster at coding, or work 2-3x harder, or have 2-3x less side tasks, he said. Multiplied together, engineers can reach 10x productivity. "2-3x is often actually an understatement," Chen said. "I know people who literally are five times more productive coders than anybody else." The advent of generative AI and coding tools supercharges Chen's math: "Add in all the AI efficiencies that you get. You just multiply all those things out and you get to 100," he said. Agentic AI coding tools have taken over much of software engineering, writing code for developers, sometime with minimal human editing necessary. But these tools still need a prompt, which Chen said makes them most useful to those who have high-level ideas. "It often just removes a lot of the drudgery of your day-to-day work," Chen said. "I do think it disproportionately favors people who are already the '10x engineers.'"
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
College Dropout Entrepreneur Boasts That Peter Thiel's Book Is "Probably the Best Book I've Read, and I've Only Read a Few Pages"
Ever since college dropouts Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began pedaling the romantic tale of founding Apple in Jobs' parents' Los Altos garage, college-age tech bros have longed to follow in their footsteps. But there's just one tiny thorn: the "founder's story" of late-night struggles and coffee-fueled breadboarding is mostly a capitalist fairy tale. Still, it's a mythos tech billionaire overlord Peter Thiel is all too eager to stoke. His empire is built on image — even the stereotypical "evil mastermind" vibe is a carefully groomed persona — which he disseminates across Silicon Valley hopefuls via the almighty Thiel Fellowship. Each year, Thiel selects up to 20 "Thiel fellows" to each receive $200,000 and drop out of college in order to pursuit a tech startup. Though some come straight out of high school, many Thiel fellows historically come from Ivy league schools, which isn't exactly the kind of background that screams "all or nothing." Thanks to Thiel's massive profile and political influence, a number of Thiel fellows have watched their startups soar to billion dollar valuations. Though tech hopefuls are said to have just .01 percent of a chance to snag a Thiel Fellowship, that isn't stopping scores of wannabe founders from dropping out of college anyway. In a profile of the growing anti-college movement festering in Silicon Valley, Business Insider's Julia Hornstein sat down with a number of young dropouts to figure out just what the hell is going on. Sebastian Tan, one of over 500 students who applied for an internship at Thiel's surveillance and spying company Palantir, dreamed of being an entrepreneur. The billionaire's book, "Zero to One," is basically a tech monopolists' manifesto, and "probably the best book I've read," according to Tan, along with a laughable addendum that underscores exactly how undercooked his worldview is: "And I've only read a few pages." In April, Hornstein writes, Tan got the offer from Palantir, which he accepted, deferring his undergraduate degree until 2026. "In college, you don't learn the building skills that you need for a startup," he confidently declared. Tan's is an interesting story, especially for his early success — but he's far from alone. In 2022, there were 2.1 million college dropouts in the US. According to a World Economic Forum survey in that same year, 28 percent of dropouts did so to start a business. That's a lot of startups. But while the country's tech bros might be agog at the idea of dropping out, the reality is that very few startups succeed without advanced degree holders, let alone people who've completed undergraduate programs. Recent research found that 56 percent of startup executives hold a graduate degree, while the average age of a successful startup founder is 45. The trouble here isn't necessarily that it's "college or nothing," but rather the values, methods, and myths that startups engender — like that regulation stifles innovation, or that Silicon Valley startups exist separate of the massive economic inequality we see in the world today (on the contrary, startups have been key players in building that world.) With the kind of failure rate startups engender, there'll inevitably be a flood of unskilled, untrained labor trickling back into the economy — the kind of people who've been trained to think of themselves as "high agency individuals." That's something Arbaaz Mahmood, a would-be physicist who skipped college to do a startup developing an "AI tool for car dealerships," seems to at least acknowledge. "Honestly, nobody goes to college thinking they're going to change the world," he tells BI. "That's a vacuous lie we tell VCs to get their money. Nobody builds startups to change the world. It's just bullshit." When it comes to startups, Benjamin Shestakofsky, author of "Behind the Startup," summarizes it well: "Our relationship with technology is socially constructed. Yes, we do make choices as individuals, but our choices are embedded in broader structures that create different sorts of opportunities and constraints for us." More on startups: Columbia Student Kicked Out for Creating AI to Cheat, Raises Millions to Turn It Into a Startup
Business Insider
11-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Inside Silicon Valley's anti-college movement
Before flying from his home in Pittsburgh to Stanford's annual gathering of incoming freshmen in late April, Sebastian Tan downloaded what might be the top book on Silicon Valley's required reading list: "Zero to One," Peter Thiel's treatise on building the future. It's "probably the best book I've read, and I've only read a few pages," Tan tells me over FaceTime. Growing up, Tan believed that the ideal path to becoming a successful entrepreneur was through Stanford (where Thiel has undergraduate and law degrees). Lately, however, he's been taken with an ascendant idea in Silicon Valley, proselytized by teenage founders and billionaire tech executives alike: The real future builders skip college. "There's such an opportunity cost of going to college. In the tech world now, things are moving so fast," Tan says. "If you're in school all day, the world just passes you by." That nagging feeling led Tan, some new friends he met at Stanford's Admit Weekend, and another 500-plus of the country's top standardized test takers, to apply for an internship at Palantir, the software and defense tech company cofounded by Thiel. Palantir's Meritocracy Fellowship — a paid, semester-long role with a shot at a full-time job at the end — implores 18-year-olds like Tan to "skip the indoctrination" of college and "get the Palantir Degree." CEO Alex Karp, who holds a PhD in neoclassical social theory, has openly derided higher education. "Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect," he said on CNBC in February. (Instead, Karp said, you should read "The Technological Republic," his new cri de coeur on the "role Silicon Valley should play in the advancement and reinvention of a national project.") In April, Tan accepted his Palantir offer and deferred his Stanford enrollment to the fall of 2026. "In college, you don't learn the building skills that you need for a startup," Tan says of his decision. "You're learning computer science theory and stuff like that. It's just not as helpful if you want to go into the workforce." College dropouts have long held a mythical status in Silicon Valley. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg all spent some time enrolled at a university before leaving early, and they've driven countless other aspiring founders to follow suit. Today, a perfect storm of economic, political, and technological forces is driving young people — mostly men, as every non-college techie I interviewed happened to be — to circumvent college entirely. For one, higher education has grown prohibitively expensive: In 2024, the average federal student loan debt was just under $30,000 for those who completed a bachelor's degree, and all-in costs for some four-year degrees have now surpassed half a million dollars. At the same time, artificial intelligence and related vibe coding tools have made it easier to become a founder, prompting venture capitalists from YCombinator to Andreessen Horowitz to declare it "the best time in a decade for college students to start startups." As the Trump administration weighs stripping $3 billion in grants from Harvard and redirecting it to trade schools, the technorati are questioning what higher education is even good for. "I'm not sure that college is preparing people for, like, the jobs they need to have," Zuckerberg said on comedian Theo Von's podcast in April. Then consider the social media-fueled fixation on getting rich young and fast, and college starts to look less like a stepping stone than a detour. The impulse to forgo college completely is the latest expression of Silicon Valley's anti-elitism, shaped as much by Thiel's long-standing disdain for higher education as the Trump administration's attacks on the Ivy League. "Per the Roman dictum 'corruptio optimi pessima' — the corruption of the best is the worst — higher education is the worst institution we have," Thiel quotes Latin, the kind of thing you'd learn at a liberal arts college, in a May press release announcing the latest class of his fellowship that awards college-dropouts-turned-founders $200,000. Never attending college is becoming a thing at big tech companies like Palantir: The company says it has hired non-graduates in the past, too. The phenomenon is also sustained by a swelling stream of founders who bailed on higher education to start companies as early as high school. Whether this generation of techies run a company or write code, they've made a lofty proclamation: Real builders have never sat in lecture halls. In his commencement address to Stanford's graduating class of 2005, Steve Jobs said he had started each morning of the past three decades by looking in the mirror and asking himself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" If the answer was "no" too many days in a row, he'd change course. You ask, why are they teachers, and why are they not just in functioning society? JC Btaiche, founder of Fuse Energy Like many of the young men I spoke with for this piece, JC Btaiche tells me he's "pretty obsessed" with the Apple founder. In high school, he mimicked Jobs's practice every day for almost a year, looking into the mirror by his bed. "Every morning I'd be, like, 'I don't want to go to school,'" he says. "Life is too short. There's strong examples of people who have not gone to college who have done incredibly well." At some point, he stopped showing up to most classes. After graduating from high school, Btaiche decided not to attend college and founded Fuse Energy, a nuclear fusion startup, when he was 19. "You ask, why are they teachers, and why are they not just in functioning society?" He tells me about college professors. "You realize a lot of professors were not — just went to a postdoc, became TAs — not really qualified to be teachers. "For me, it's very important to respect who I'm learning from," he adds. Several people told me they'd rather learn from builders than ivory towered professors. Adam Guild read Walter Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" in high school to reverse-engineer the founder playbook. "If I can study how they became successful, that is a fast track to getting that guidance from people that have done what I want to do," Guild says. "Versus getting a bunch of theory that was taught in an MBA program." Now 25, Guild dropped out of high school in the tenth grade to continue building a Minecraft server he says generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. The experience emboldened him in 2020 to start Owner, a restaurant marketing platform, which closed a funding round at a $1 billion valuation in May. Guild is blunt on his assessment of colleges: "My belief is that they're more like drop shipping operations, where they stamp their logo on already extremely high potential, high IQ young people, and then take credit for their success in society," he says. The value of a degree is "negligible," Guild tells me. Instead of forking over hundreds of thousands in tuition, he argues that people like him are better off learning from biographies of iconic founders and the internet — or better yet, from an AI trained to be like Steve Jobs — than from professors who've never built anything themselves. "The autodidact is the new alumnus," Surya Midha, cofounder and chief operating officer of AI hiring platform Mercor, wrote in a recent X post. (Midha dropped out of Georgetown after receiving the Thiel Fellowship for his startup.) "College teaches you how to sound interesting at dinner parties and, when the guests leave, how to carry that performance into life." He adds, "A degree feels less like a distinction than a delay." Perhaps this DIY mindset can also be defined by a fixation on one Silicon Valley term: " high agency." Arbaaz Mahmood, who also skipped college, initially wanted to become a physicist but now runs a startup that builds an AI tool for car dealerships. He says school was a numbers game of citations and published papers. "I could just go and argue with my CEO and get things done my way," he remembers of a startup he worked at after leaving higher ed behind. "That obviously changed everything." Being young and getting his way has made Mahmood realize that college is a countersignal. "In the era of the internet, if you have to go to college, it is probably because you're mediocre," he continues. "Honestly, nobody goes to college thinking they're going to change the world. That's a vacuous lie we tell VCs to get their money. Nobody builds startups to change the world. It's just bullshit." You cannot truly be fulfilled as a man and be in education for long. Shawn Schneider, 22, founder of Eldil AI Shawn Schneider — a 22-year-old who dropped out of his Christian high school, briefly attended community college, dropped out again, and earlier this year founded a marketing platform for generative AI — tells me that college is outdated. Skipping it, for him, is as efficient as it is ideological. "It signals DEI," he says. "It signals, basically, woke and compromised institutions. At least in the circles I run in, the sentiment is like they should die." There's another reason Schneider dropped out: "By being a young man and not having the ability to make money, there's a piece missing from your soul," he says, in language that would feel at home on a manosphere podcast. "You cannot truly be fulfilled as a man and be in education for long." (Schneider's startup, Eldil AI, raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding and is generating revenue, he tells me.) Throughout America, falling male enrollment rates suggest that a rising number of men don't see their place in a university classroom. In 2023, college enrollment among 18- to 24-year-olds was down 1.2 million from its peak in 2011; men accounted for 1 million of those missing students, according to the Pew Research Center. Schneider says that the women from his high school in Idaho were "so much better at doing what the teacher asks, and that was just not what I was good at or what the other masculine guys I knew were good at." He's married with two children, a girl and a boy, which has made him realize that schools should be separated by gender to "make men more manly, and women more feminine." I ask if his AI startup has hired women. "I should be careful here so I don't get sued," he says. "Yeah, right now we're all men because those are the four most qualified people I know. And like, when I say qualified, I mean really qualified." Less convinced of the anti-college movement, of course, are the university professors the cause's adherents rail against. "Very, very few people are truly autodidactic," says David Deming, a Harvard economist who studies how education shapes life outcomes. He compares the self-taught, often AI-driven, approach to copying a friend's homework, then trying to solve the same question on your own during a final exam. "I think a lot of them are fooling themselves," he says. For 18-year-olds learning exclusively on the job, whether at a startup or a public company like Palantir, the education tends to be narrow and vocational, unlike a more expansive college curriculum. Some early-career founders see no value in such a syllabus. "I don't believe in the model of learning that exists in colleges," Mahmood tells me. "In fact, I don't want to learn anything at all. I want to preserve my brain." Harvard economist David Deming cautions that bypassing college for a company shuts doors, adding that what's good for the company sn't always what's best for employees. Deming cautions that bypassing college for a company shuts doors, adding that what's good for the company — which consequently "will have much more control over you," he says — isn't always what's best for employees. While the Zucks and the Jobses have outsized roles in Silicon Valley's cultural imagination, founders who dropped out or never attended college are still a "vanishingly small share of people," Deming says. And college degrees still pay off. Across nearly every occupation, workers with degrees earn more, on average, perhaps because the college degree affords graduates with an adaptable skillset and an "openness to new things," he adds. The percent difference in earnings between college and high school graduates, or the college wage premium, has held at 75 to 80% for the last decade. For an average American, Deming says, the return on an investment in college — including the opportunity cost of attending as well as the sticker price — exceeds the annual returns of investing in the stock market, buying a home, and starting a business. For founders, "The question is, would they do better or worse if they had gone to college?" Deming asks. "They get exposed to new ideas or new people, and they pivot. You know, founders pivot all the time." Palantir's head of talent, Marge York, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 with a degree in political science and a lingering sense that she learned from a "pretty homogenous tilt of some, not all, of my professors," she tells me. Amid political upheaval and global conflict, Palantir applicants are questioning whether college still serves the democratic values it claims to champion, according to York. "The success of Western civilization," she argues, "does not seem to be what our educational institutions are tuned towards right now." (Karp echoes this sentiment in his book, writing that top colleges "remain remarkably cloistered and walled off from the world.") Universities like Penn have long held a monopoly on the most formative years of smart students' lives. But Palantir thinks college admissions are missing something. The college application process, it argues, is "absent meritocracy" and "based on subjective and shallow criteria," the fellowship's job description reads. In addition to an SAT or ACT score at or above a 1460 or 33, respectively, the Meritocracy Fellowship requires applicants to provide a personal statement to the questions, Why do you want to work at Palantir? And, what do you consider your three greatest achievements? York thinks this "merit-based" approach gives high school seniors admitted to non-Ivies a better shot at success. (One applicant, she mentions, had started a successful company in addition to excelling academically in high school and had only been admitted to a local state school.) "This question of, 'what possibly more do I need to do to gain access to these places or to be worthy of them?'" York says. "It's opaque what the admission standards are." For all its posturing against elite universities, top colleges seem well-represented in the incoming fellowship class, with some accepted fellows deferring admission from Stanford, Penn, Dartmouth, and Columbia, according to their LinkedIn profiles. A spokesperson for Palantir said in an email that the company "did not systematically ask candidates which colleges they were considering or committed to, nor do we plan to." While fellows won't take finals to clinch the "Palantir Degree," the company is crafting an education of its own. Fellows will follow a company-curated syllabus that will teach them "how to think," with "a great books bent to it," York says, which could include texts like the Federalist Papers or from Plato. The jury's still out on whether Karp's book will be required reading. "I was truly almost moved to tears by it," York tells me. "It's really, I think, for an artist colony, a very appropriately artistic and literary syllabus." Sebastian Tan, the soon-to-be Palantir fellow, still plans to attend Stanford eventually. He's concerned he will "spend another four years of my life learning a lot of technical and theological things, but not really be able to apply them," he says, but he still sees the value in a liberal arts education. Plus, Tan adds, his mom really wants him to go.
