Kevin Hartz is often the first one through the door. He co-founded Xoom in 2001, when sending money abroad meant standing in line at Western Union. In 2013, it went public, and in 2015 PayPal paid $1.1 billion for it. Four years after launching Xoom, he co-founded Eventbrite, which went public in 2018 and turned buying event tickets into something you would do without having to throw your laptop into the ocean.
After working at Founders Fund, Hartz co-founded his own enterprise capital firm, A* Capital (a nod to IT algorithm), and in 2020, he spotted one other trend before the masses: the SPAC boom. His blank check company “one” swallowed up 3D printing company Markforged in a $2.1 billion reverse merger in 2021, right when every other Silicon Valley financier suddenly decided that SPACs were the future.
Now Hartz is taking on one other thing — teen founders, not as a social experiment but as an unplanned investment thesis. His company recently issued a check Aaruan AI-powered prediction engine whose one founder was too young to get a driving license at the time. Hartz is not alone in this. The “drop and build” movement, made most famous by founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, is becoming a standard lifestyle alternative for a certain type of ambitious kid.
Consider Cory Levy, who interned at Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures, and Techstars while in highschool, then dropped out of the University of Illinois after his freshman 12 months. Today he runs Z’s colleaguesa week-long accelerator that awards tech founders – even highschool students – with $10,000 grants. When Levy resigned a decade ago, the Thiel scholarship was a radically latest idea. Today, “the dropout community is at an all-time high,” he said he told Business Insider last spring. “During a large group dinner of 15-20 people, we look around the table and realize that no one has a college degree.”
It’s becoming enough of a “thing” that accelerator Y Combinator, which has been quietly reinforcing dropout culture since its inception, recently launched a program designed for students who want to start out firms but don’t desire to drop out of school. The program allows them to use while still in school, receive immediate acceptance and funding, and defer participation in YC until after graduation. (For YC, known for counterculture, this is a very on-brand move.)
Naturally, TechCrunch covers this trend: see here and here and here. But to learn more, I’ll catch up with Hartz at the StrictlyVC event as part of TechCrunch’s crazy Disrupt show, which kicks off in San Francisco on Monday, October 27. (Hartz speaks on Tuesday, October 28).
Meanwhile, here are excerpts from Friday’s conversation, during which we began to explore the topic:
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
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October 27-29, 2025
TC: We’ve at all times seen teenagers starting firms, but we’re definitely seeing more of it than ever before, and you tell me that is what is going on on behind the scenes. Why do you think this is so?
Kevin Hartz: You can meet really vibrant kids who are just really bored in school. I see classes of Stanford freshmen and sophomores who fall into this category – they were completely bored, some ended up homeschooling and just excelled. Even at the best universities, they still drop out in their desire to build, learn, and push boundaries. We had one company whose founders were 18, 18 and 15 years old. I think the CTO is probably 16 now, but he was 15 when we supported them. But that is not really extraordinary.
How does Z Fellows compare to Thiel Associationbegan many years ago by Peter Thiel?
It’s eerily similar. The difference is that the Thiel Fellowship is a nonprofit and – I’m a big fan of Peter – but as a nonprofit you could not be in such a hurry. Cory [has] Just [been] we have been building Z Fellows over the last few years and it’s a really great program. It’s again a matter of Peter being ahead of the curve and seeing value in the irony of offering money to quit. This phenomenon is growing and growing and who knows how long it is going to last, especially given the costs of universities and what many people perceive as toxic environments in universities with weak administration. All this makes teenagers ask themselves, “Why don’t I just quit school and build something?”
Does Z Fellows take shares in firms?
They offer a very small check – $10,000. There is also a fund where they support people later. But mostly it’s a no-strings-attached $10,000 starter piece. I think Cory picks a few people to place up $100,000 for pre-seed [rounds]too.
What do you think about the statistics we’re seeing about kids not having the ability to find a job after school? I think part of it comes from realizing that even if you graduate, there will not be a job waiting for you.
There’s one other phenomenon going down – this reversal that ought to occur in ’26 or ’27 when there can be more 1099s than W-2s. It simply implies that 30 years ago, people worked for large corporations like Nestlé, McKinsey and IBM. Now they work for themselves. They trade cryptocurrencies or build their very own firms. This points to American individualism. It’s almost as if the United States is entering entrepreneurial hyperdrive.
I think it’s because people want to start out firms, but I also think that increasingly people have to start out firms because they are being pushed out of their roles attributable to the efficiencies gained from AI and more.
Paul Graham said something many years ago that has at all times stuck with me, that for a young founder, a startup is each good and bad because it takes over his life. You were a young entrepreneur. How do you are feeling about financing a 15-year-old knowing that his company could possibly be doing very well and that person may never have the opportunity to experience what most 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds experience?
I discovered it to be an exciting experience, but it was punctuated by painful challenges. It highlights all the things. And that is a good point. [Seventeen,] this is the age of marines who are sent into battle because they are fearless. Maybe there’s something about this age where people drive very hard. However, I ponder whether it is still too early to know the implications, given the recent nature of this phenomenon.
We’re just at the starting of what I might call a super cycle of technology expansion, with AI and all the things else – especially AI. We are in the very early rounds. OpenAI and Anthropic are growing incredibly fast in the core part of the model. Now all of us start working on the application layers. You have coding copilots like Cognition in addition to Decagon and Sierra in the AI CRM space. But there are many other categories that need disruption. Even Sierra and Decagon are in the very, very early stages of their missions.
You have daughters. Would you wish to see them go to varsity? How would you are feeling if they said, “Dad, I want to start something now instead of going to college”?
Our 17-year-old is now applying to schools. She wants to achieve college experience. I would like that taste of life. She never really questioned it. I attempted to offer her as many possibilities as possible to contemplate alternatives, and I’ll do the same for our 13-year-old, who can be next in line.
Of the bets you’ve got made in the last 12 months, how many do you think were on teenagers?
Nearly 20%.
What would you say two years ago?
About 5%.