Kevin Hartz tends to be the first through the door. In 2001, he founded xoom, back when sending money across the border meant standing in the west. In 2013, it was public, and in 2015, Paypal paid $ 1.1 billion for. Four years after the launch of XOOM, they had an event that was established, which became public in 2018 and became the Buy Buy Buy to Something in the Ocean.
After founding the fund, Hartz co-founded his own venture company, capital (a nod to computer scientific algorithms), then in 2020, he discovered a scientific trend before the masses: boom spac. The company checks the hollow, “” swallows up the 3D Marfit Marker Marker that reverses $ 2.1 billion in 2021, correctly as if all the financial in Silicon Valley suddenly decided on Spacs.
Now Hartz is in the next chapter – a teenage founder, not as a social experiment, but as an unplanned investment thesis. Really recently cut the check AARUan ai-powered prediction engine with one founder who was too young to get a driver’s license at the time. Hartz is not alone here by any means. The dropout-and-build movement, best known by founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Zuckerberg, has become the default lifestyle choice for some types of ambition.
Consider Cory Levy, who disrupted founding funds, union squares, and technology while still in college at the University of Illinois after his freshman year. Today he walked Z scholarshipAcceleration one week that the hands of the technical reduction – even if the school is high – $ 10,000 grant. When the levy was released a decade ago, the Fellowship was a radical new idea. Now, “The Dropouts community is at an all-time high,” he said against insider trading late spring. “At a large group dinner of 15 or 20 people, we’ll look across the table, and nobody has a college degree.”
So it’s enough of a “thing” that the combination of accelerator y accelerator Y, which has killed the culture down quietly from the beginning, has recently rolled the program It is designed for students who want to start a company but don’t want to let it go. The program allows them to apply while still in school, get paid immediately and finance their participation in YC until after graduation. (For YC, which is known for being countercultural, the move is very much on brand.)
Naturally, techcrunch has covered the trend: take a look Here and Here and HereSee rank-. But to learn more, I will sit down with Hartz at a rigorous event in the gulap of techcrunch Disturbed The show will be held in San Francisco on Monday, October 27. (Hartz said Tuesday, October 28.)
In the meantime, here are excerpts from the conversation we had on Friday, where we started exploring the topic:
TechCrunch events
San Francisco
I’m fat
October 27, 2025
TC: We’ve seen teenage companies, but that’s for sure Taste It’s like we’re seeing more than before, and you’re telling us that this is happening behind the scenes. Why do you think?
Kevin Hartz: You find these bright kids who are just bored in school. I see a class of Stanford Freshmen or Sophomores who fall into this category – they’re all bored, some are done with homeschooling, and they’re just excelling. Even at top universities, he still goes and puts in his thirst, to study, to push the envelope. We have one company where the founders are 18, 18, and 15. I think the CTO is probably 16 now, but he was 15 when you hired him. But that’s not unusual.
How Z FOINY STOME compares to Thiel Fellowshiplaunched last year by Peter Thiel?
Incredibly the same. The difference is that the Fellowship is not an improfit, and – I’m a big fan of Peter – but it’s not a nonprofit, you might not be there hustling. Cory (has) just (been) building on zako Z in the past few years, and it’s a very good program. This is about this again Peter is ahead of the curve, seeing the value in the title that offers money to release. The phenomenon has been growing and building, and who knows for sure it will continue, especially at the expense of universities and what many people see as a toxic environment. All of these lines drive teenagers to ask, ‘Why not just let go and build?’
Does z scholarship take venture in the company?
He offered me a very small check – $10,000. Then there’s the fund where they go back to other people. But usually not the obligation of $ 10,000 initial deduction. I think Cory picked a couple to make $100K in the pre-seed (round) as well.
What is it made of statistics We see, related to children who can not work in school? I have to think some of this is consciously driven even if you graduate, it may not be a task waiting for you.
There’s another phenomenon that’s happening — this flipping is supposed to happen in ’26 or ’27 where there will be more 1099s than W-2s. This means that 30 years ago, people worked for big companies like Nestlé or Mckinsey or IBM. Now he is working for himself. They are trading crypto or building their own business. The indictment for American individualism. It’s almost like the United States goes into entrepreneurial hyperdrive.
I think it’s because people want to start companies, but I also feel, more and more, people have to start companies because they can’t get rid of their guilt.
Paul Graham said that many years ago that always stuck with me, so others and bad for young founders at the beginning, because it has taken their lives. You are a young entrepreneur. How do you feel about financing a 15-year-old, knowing that his company may be doing well and this person does not have the ability to feel what most 15-, 17-year-olds have to experience?
I found it to be an exhilarating experience, but checked with painful challenges. It improves everything. And that’s a good point. (Seventeen,) That is the age in the Marines they send to war because they are not afraid. Maybe there is an age when people age is very difficult. But I wonder if it’s too soon to understand the implications, given the record of this phenomenon.
We’re just at the beginning of what I would call a super cycle of expansiveness in technology, with AI and so on – especially AI. We are early. You have Openai and Anthropik is growing rapidly on the basic model from that. Now we all start to work at the application layer. You have co-pilot coding like cognition, and then you have Decagon and Sierra in the AI CRM space. But there are many other categories that are still being disrupted. Even Sierra and Decagon are very, very early in the mission.
You have got a daughter. Would you like to see him go to college? How would you feel if you said, “Dad, I want to start now and not go to college”?
We are 17 years old applying to colleagues today. They want the college experience. They want a sense of life. He never asked. I try to give it a chance because I can consider alternatives, and I will do the 13-year-old thing that will rise.
Of the bets you have made over the past year, how would you say teenagers?
Close to 20%.
And two years ago, what would you have said?
About 5%.