Build in public, fail in public: what it’s like to be a founder under 20 right now
Build in public, fail in public: what it’s like to be a founder under 20 right now
公开构建，公开失败：当下 20 岁以下的创业者是种什么体验
For Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, 19, there is no middle ground. Either he builds a company as valuable as Google, he says, or he fails and ends up on the streets. He started coding at 15 in his native Kazakhstan, completed a couple of summer programs in San Francisco, and cold-DM’ed every Y Combinator founder he could find on LinkedIn until one gave him an angel check for his first company at age 17. That company, now the YC-backed Nozomio, is an API index for AI agents — a tool that helps AI agents find and use software services — and has raised more than $6 million in funding to date. “I either win or lose, and a lot of young founders have the same mindset,” he told TechCrunch. “They just want to win.”
对于 19 岁的 Arlan Rakhmetzhanov 来说，没有中间地带。他说，要么他建立一家像谷歌那样有价值的公司，要么就失败并流落街头。他 15 岁时在家乡哈萨克斯坦开始编程，在旧金山完成了几个暑期项目，并在 LinkedIn 上向他能找到的每一位 Y Combinator 创始人发送冷私信，直到 17 岁时有人为他的第一家公司提供了天使投资。那家公司就是如今获得 YC 支持的 Nozomio，它是一个 AI 代理的 API 索引——一种帮助 AI 代理查找和使用软件服务的工具——迄今已筹集了超过 600 万美元的资金。“我要么赢，要么输，很多年轻的创始人都有同样的心态，”他告诉 TechCrunch。“他们只是想赢。”
Young founders like Rakhmetzhanov are building under a new set of pressures. Investors are throwing more capital at them, yet the expectation to hit that “north star” milestone — the one big number investors are chasing — hasn’t relaxed, and every misstep along the way is now publicly dissected on social media.
像 Rakhmetzhanov 这样的年轻创始人正在承受着一套新的压力。投资者向他们投入了更多资本，但实现“北极星”里程碑（投资者所追求的那个大数字）的期望并没有降低，而且沿途的每一个失误现在都会在社交媒体上被公开剖析。
While Silicon Valley VCs have always famously loved backing young college dropout founders, they preferred to see them paired with technical founders, or at least to have some experience — ideally with a FAANG company (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) — on their résumés. In many ways, that is still very true. But AI tools have democratized the opportunity to build, shortening the timelines of success and enabling more young people to start successful companies without stepping foot inside a Big Tech company.
虽然硅谷的风险投资人一直以青睐年轻的大学辍学生创始人而闻名，但他们更倾向于看到这些创始人与技术合伙人搭档，或者至少在简历上有一些经验——最好是在 FAANG（Meta、亚马逊、苹果、Netflix 和谷歌）公司工作过。在许多方面，这仍然是事实。但 AI 工具使构建产品的机会民主化了，缩短了成功的时间线，使更多的年轻人无需踏入大科技公司就能创办成功的企业。
Pranjali Awasthi, 19, is an example of that. She dropped out of high school to launch an AI startup, then attended Georgia Tech before dropping out of that, too, to launch Slashy, a YC-backed startup that bills itself as the “Cursor for emails” and helps consumers manage their email inboxes. After more than a year running that company, she recently announced she’s now building yet a new startup currently in stealth. When she was younger, around 14 or 15, she recalled, investors whom she would pitch often asked why she was looking to build a company. “It’s gotten more normal now,” she said, “post-18.”
19 岁的 Pranjali Awasthi 就是一个例子。她高中辍学创办了一家 AI 初创公司，随后进入佐治亚理工学院，之后又退学创办了 Slashy。这是一家获得 YC 支持的初创公司，自称为“电子邮件界的 Cursor”，旨在帮助消费者管理电子邮件收件箱。在经营该公司一年多后，她最近宣布正在筹备一家处于隐身模式的新初创公司。她回忆说，当她更年轻（大约 14 或 15 岁）时，她向投资者推介项目，对方经常问她为什么要创业。“现在这已经变得更正常了，”她说，“18 岁以后。”
It seems more than ever, investors look to founders like Awasthi, whose experiences can be traced through “GitHub activity, open-source contributions, communities they’ve already built, and familiarity with all the latest tools in AI,” Ashley Smith, a general partner at the early-stage firm Vermilion, told TechCrunch. “A lot of young developers learn how to build software through contributing to open-source projects or toying around with the latest AI tooling,” she explained. “They have more time to do that while in college or younger than someone with a full-time job and a mortgage.”
早期投资机构 Vermilion 的普通合伙人 Ashley Smith 告诉 TechCrunch，投资者似乎比以往任何时候都更关注像 Awasthi 这样的创始人，他们的经历可以通过“GitHub 活动、开源贡献、他们已经建立的社区以及对所有最新 AI 工具的熟悉程度”来追踪。“许多年轻开发者通过参与开源项目或摆弄最新的 AI 工具来学习如何构建软件，”她解释道。“与那些有全职工作和房贷的人相比，他们在大学期间或更年轻时有更多时间做这些事情。”
Smith said a “meaningful” share of her portfolio consists of companies founded by those under 30, with a handful even younger than 21, she said, adding that she’s “clearly not skeptical of youth.” “What they lack in experience, they make up for in excitement to experiment and lack of fear,” she continued. But she admits the market has become more merciless. “It doesn’t give you room to learn slowly anymore,” she said.
Smith 表示，她的投资组合中有一部分“相当大”的比例是由 30 岁以下的人创立的公司，其中少数甚至不到 21 岁。她补充说，她“显然并不怀疑年轻人”。“他们缺乏经验，但他们用实验的热情和无畏来弥补，”她继续说道。但她承认市场已经变得更加无情。“它不再给你慢慢学习的空间了，”她说。
There are more funding opportunities than ever, regardless of age — accelerators, incubators, pre-seed funds. But that money comes with strings attached: Founders like Rakhmetzhanov and Awasthi, flush with millions in cash, are expected to deliver growth in months, not years. “The forgiveness that used to exist at an early stage and the assumption you’d iterate your way to product-market fit doesn’t exist right now,” Smith continued. “Everyone is looking for the next Cursor, even though that growth trajectory is an outlier, not the norm.”
无论年龄大小，现在的融资机会比以往任何时候都多——加速器、孵化器、种子前基金。但这些资金是有条件的：像 Rakhmetzhanov 和 Awasthi 这样手握数百万现金的创始人，被期望在几个月而不是几年内实现增长。“过去在早期阶段存在的宽容，以及通过迭代实现产品与市场契合的假设，现在已经不存在了，”Smith 继续说道。“每个人都在寻找下一个 Cursor，尽管那种增长轨迹是一个特例，而不是常态。”
For many founders — especially those building in public — the relentless strain to succeed can lead to murky ethical territory, or even predatory deal terms, since younger founders are often too new to the game to know what’s standard, yet ambitious enough to chase growth at all costs. To keep up, revenue numbers start to look inflated, while content creation for social media starts to crowd out writing good code. The excessive posturing is perhaps inevitable, since getting attention is now harder than ever in a crowded AI market. It’s all about who can convince “the most people [they] are smarter than everyone else in the space,” Smith said, “and make the most noise about it.”
对于许多创始人——尤其是那些“公开构建”的人来说——追求成功的无情压力可能导致模糊的道德地带，甚至是不公平的交易条款，因为年轻的创始人往往对游戏规则太陌生，不知道什么是标准，但又雄心勃勃，不惜一切代价追求增长。为了跟上节奏，收入数字开始显得虚高，而社交媒体的内容创作开始挤占编写优质代码的时间。这种过度的姿态或许是不可避免的，因为在拥挤的 AI 市场中，获得关注比以往任何时候都难。Smith 说，这完全取决于谁能说服“最多的人相信他们比这个领域里的任何人都聪明，并为此制造最大的声量。”
“In 2004, you could quietly iterate for years without anyone watching,” Awasthi added. “Now there is this constant ambient pressure from LinkedIn and Twitter where every raise, every milestone, every pivot is public.” That means some young founders aren’t just worried about hitting competitive revenue marks or funding valuations — they’re also under pressure to perform the appearance of being a successful founder. That pressure has always existed in startup culture, but founders say it’s grown more extreme.
“在 2004 年，你可以安静地迭代多年，而没有人关注，”Awasthi 补充道。“现在，来自 LinkedIn 和 Twitter 的持续环境压力无处不在，每一次融资、每一个里程碑、每一次转型都是公开的。”这意味着一些年轻的创始人不仅担心达到有竞争力的收入目标或融资估值，他们还承受着表现出“成功创始人”形象的压力。这种压力在创业文化中一直存在，但创始人们表示，它已经变得更加极端。
“If you’re a startup and you’re competing in a market, usually you worry about incumbents,” Timothy Chen, an investor at Essence Ventures, told TechCrunch. “Now you worry about your neighbors.” For example, “everybody’s doing shiny, good-looking launch videos,” he noted. “It wasn’t even a thing three years ago.” The trend was popularized by Cluely founder Roy Lee, now around age 22, whose startup initially promised to help students cheat on exams — a premise that dazzled investors like Andreessen Horowitz and helped the company raise $20 million. Though Cluely is now more of a note-taking tool, Lee became a face of young Silicon Valley talent. “The pressure is coming from, ‘I need to show off much better, quick,’” Chen continued.
“如果你是一家初创公司，在市场上竞争，通常你会担心现有的巨头，”Essence Ventures 的投资者 Timothy Chen 告诉 TechCrunch。“现在你担心的是你的邻居。”例如，“每个人都在制作光鲜亮丽的发布视频，”他指出。“三年前这甚至还不是一回事。”这一趋势由 Cluely 的创始人 Roy Lee（现年约 22 岁）推广开来，他的初创公司最初承诺帮助学生在考试中作弊——这一前提让 Andreessen Horowitz 等投资者眼花缭乱，并帮助该公司筹集了 2000 万美元。虽然 Cluely 现在更多是一个笔记工具，但 Lee 成为了硅谷年轻人才的代表。“压力来自于‘我需要更快、更好地炫耀自己’，”Chen 继续说道。
Not hitting the bar has bred new anxiety. “When Zuck was building Facebook, there wasn’t this huge negative social ecosystem,” Aidan Guo, 20, told TechCrunch. He’s the co-founder of the AI desktop assistant startup Attention Engineering, which has raised around $1.6 million in funding to date. Much of the strain, as he describes it, is self-imposed.
未能达到标准滋生了新的焦虑。“当扎克伯格在构建 Facebook 时，并没有这种巨大的负面社交生态系统，”20 岁的 Aidan Guo 告诉 TechCrunch。他是 AI 桌面助手初创公司 Attention Engineering 的联合创始人，该公司迄今已筹集了约 160 万美元的资金。正如他所描述的那样，大部分压力是自找的。