Lila Shroff writes:

Brendan Foody is 22 years old and runs a company worth billions. This August, I met the young CEO in a glass conference room overlooking the San Francisco Bay. While his peers are searching for their first jobs, Foody is pursuing a “master plan,” as he calls it, to upend the global labor market. His start-up, Mercor, offers an AI-powered hiring platform: Bots weed through résumés, and even conduct interviews. In the next five years, Foody told me, AI could automate 50 percent of the tasks that people do today. “That will be extremely exciting to see play out,” he said. Humanity will become much more productive, he thinks, allowing us to cure cancer and land on Mars.

Although Foody does not have much by way of conventional work experience, he is already a seasoned entrepreneur. By his account, in middle school, he ran a business reselling Safeway donuts to his classmates at a 400 percent markup. His success at donut arbitrage made his mom nervous he might try to sell sketchier vices (drugs), so she sent him to Catholic school. There, he met his Mercor co-founders. In high school, he started a consulting business for online sneaker resellers that he said raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time he graduated. ChatGPT came out during his sophomore year at Georgetown, and he soon ditched school to build Mercor. When we met this summer, Mercor was worth $2 billion.

The AI boom has become synonymous with a few giant companies: OpenAI, Nvidia, and Anthropic. All are led by middle-aged men who’ve had long careers in Silicon Valley. But many of the most successful new AI start-ups have been founded by people barely old enough to drink. Unlike OpenAI or Anthropic, Mercor is already profitable. Meanwhile, Cursor, a massively popular AI-coding tool run by 25-year-old Michael Truell, was recently valued at nearly $30 billion—roughly the same as United Airlines.

In many ways, Foody, Truell, and others like them epitomize the long-standing Silicon Valley young-founder archetype: They are intensely nerdy and ravenously ambitious. (Foody’s bio on X reads “labor markets fascinate me,” and his pronouns are listed as “can/do.”) But this group is coming of age at a time when the tech industry’s aims—and sense of self-importance—have reached existential heights. They dream of creating superintelligent bots that can dramatically extend our lifespan and perhaps even automate scientific discovery itself.

If they are successful, they could end up with even more power than the tech titans who preceded them. If they fail, based on what I saw during a week in San Francisco, they seem determined to enjoy the party while it lasts.

The promise of remaking the world (and getting rich while doing so) has drawn a fresh wave of dropouts and new grads to San Francisco. Following ChatGPT’s release, Rayan Krishnan abandoned plans to pursue a Ph.D. and instead launched an AI start-up. “It seemed like there was opportunity everywhere,” he told me. One afternoon on my trip to San Francisco, I met Krishnan, the 24-year-old CEO of Vals AI, at his office, a refurbished brewery in the SoMa neighborhood. Vals, which helps evaluate AI models’ performance on real-world tasks, has raised $5 million. Venture capitalists “are now indexing much more on companies that are started by younger founders,” he said.

Many tech investors, I heard during my trip, believe that young people who have never spent time in an office are best-positioned to construct our AI future. Whereas 30-year-olds are already supposedly lost to the byzantine ways of workplace bureaucracies, those a decade their junior are blank slates. Foody recounted to me the story of dining with Adam D’Angelo when the Quora CEO (and OpenAI board member) was considering investing in Mercor. D’Angelo asked Foody about his work experience, and the young founder admitted that he didn’t have any. Good, D’Angelo said, before later cutting him a check. Mercor’s investors also include the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. [Continue reading…]