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.
In an attempt to track down these aspiring Zuckerbergs, Bay Area venture-capital firms host elaborate dinners for young tech workers and hire undergraduate scouts at elite colleges to keep tabs on promising talent. The same week I met Foody and Krishnan, I attended a mixer at an all-female hacker house—a shared residence and workspace—in the south of San Francisco. The women, all college-aged, had spent the summer hosting a series of VC-subsidized events. For one of the gatherings, a prominent firm had paid for a hibachi chef to cook dinner in their backyard. The night I visited the house, the women were hosting three investors for a talk. Among the panelists was Liz Wessel, a partner at the investment fund First Round Capital. Wessel said that two-thirds of her portfolio was composed of “young” founders, a label she applied to those 25 and under. By that calculus, even 26 counts as old.
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Young people in the industry are coming up with new ways to profit. Later in the trip, I spoke with Vatsalya Verma, 23, and Jasper Vyda, 21, at a Victorian mansion in Lower Pacific Heights that they’d rented through Airbnb. The front entrance was littered with flattened cans. The night prior, Verma and Vyda had thrown a 200-person party to celebrate the launch of a “private network” called V11, which they described to me as an exclusive community of “the smartest friends across the entire nation.” Verma and Vyda believe that these friends are going to start Silicon Valley’s next unicorns. They partner with early-stage venture funds, who then “capitalize on our friendships to basically find deals,” Verma told me.
The Airbnb had been the site of the after-party, but the main event was held at a venue run by Silicon Valley Bank, where they had organized a poker room in a decommissioned bank vault. If Silicon Valley Bank sounds familiar, that’s because it collapsed dramatically in 2023, causing the largest single-day bank run in American history.
Watching Silicon Valley mint billionaires who were born around the time Facebook launched is a spectacle. But it’s been particularly absorbing for me because of my proximity to these young founders. Like Foody, I was a college sophomore when ChatGPT came out. I went to Stanford, where the chatbot set off a frenzy. My econ professor hosted students at his house for catered dinners with C-suite executives from Google and OpenAI. Waiters stood by and served champagne.
When I graduated last year and moved East, seemingly all my peers stayed in the Bay Area to work in AI. Over time, I’ve watched as some of them have been radicalized by the hype of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. (“I think I’ll live more than 1,000 years,” one recently told me.) Many have started their own companies. Early in my trip, I ran into a friend on the street waiting for a self-driving Waymo to take him to a vegan sushi restaurant. He had just raised millions for his AI start-up, and had hired a beloved Stanford adjunct professor to join his team, he told me.
People I know from my hometown near Seattle have also moved to San Francisco to join the AI scene. One helped start the all-female hacker house. Another launched Friend, which sells a $129 AI-powered necklace. Friend went viral earlier this year for plastering the New York City subway with more than 10,000 posters promoting the virtues of human-AI friendship. (I’ll never leave dirty dishes in the sink, one ad read.) Avi Schiffmann, the company’s 23-year-old CEO, has been cast as a misanthropic tech founder emblematic of Silicon Valley’s ills. I know Schiffmann as the nerdy kid from high school who ran one of the world’s most popular COVID-19 tracking websites. We used to hang out in our local public library brainstorming start-up ideas (for example, OnlyFans for stock-market watch lists). Over time, we grew apart. I finished my degree. He dropped out of Harvard and rode his motorcycle along the California coast.
[Read: The most reviled tech CEO in New York confronts his haters]
In August, Schiffmann hosted me for a few nights at his home in the Lower Haight neighborhood. For someone building an AI-companionship start-up, Schiffmann lives a strikingly offline life. Much to my inconvenience, he didn’t have Wi-Fi. Instead, he spent a lot of time painting. “This is post-AGI living,” he told me. “It’s a religion I call life-maxxing.” One day, Schiffmann and I walked to a nearby park and marveled at the glorious San Francisco afternoon. “God sculpted the Bay,” he pronounced. Now the Bay is sculpting God. Or at least, a bunch of other 20-somethings in San Francisco think they are.
On my final evening, I ended up at a sci-fi-Barbie-themed party at San Francisco’s Tesla showroom. The party was sponsored by a smattering of investment firms and start-ups with names such as CodeRabbit and Bubble Computing. “The vibe is unapologetically feminine and fun,” read the invitation, which warned that anyone wearing a Patagonia vest would be turned away at the door. Even though this wasn’t an official Tesla event, the company was showing off its latest car tech. I arrived—sans Patagonia—and joined a small group for a spin in a Cybertruck.
On the showroom floor, a long line snaked toward the bar, where people were ordering the James Damore, a cocktail named after the Google employee who was famously fired in 2017 after writing a memo arguing that women at the company were less likely to end up in tech and leadership roles partially due to innate biological differences. (The hosts of this party were enforcing a 50/50 balance between male and female guests, which had left hundreds of guys on the waitlist.)
In many ways, the scene was absurd. But Cybertruck rides aside, it didn’t feel all that different from parties I have hosted in my own cramped apartment. Music blared while people awkwardly exchanged small talk and sipped their drinks. At the edges, some flirted while others danced. For a moment, I forgot that I was surrounded by young people at the center of an industry whose continued growth is now propping up the American economy. Then I spotted a Tesla humanoid robot standing on a pedestal, flanked by columns of hot-pink balloons.
It’s hard to overstate just how much money is coursing through the city. This summer, Meta offered one 24-year-old a $250 million pay package. While in San Francisco, I heard rumors of people in their early 20s holed up in a bar discussing strategies for tax evasion.
The floods of money have made for a culture of constant comparison. People do napkin math at the dinner table using the latest funding announcements to calculate their friends’ net worths and fret about declining job offers to join Anthropic or OpenAI. The most successful become the target of schadenfreude: Behind closed doors, people debate whether Mercor will stay afloat or come crashing down. When the AI bubble bursts, and many say it will, they could get wiped out entirely. For now, there’s a Gatsby-ness to it all.
No matter what happens, the country could be in for a shock. If AI progress stalls and the money dries up, there will be economic chaos. If AI progress advances and leads to massive waves of automation, there will also be economic chaos. Throughout my trip, people kept asking me whether I was familiar with the “escape the permanent underclass” meme. It implies that a huge amount of economic output will soon come to be produced by a select few AI companies. Everyone else will get automated into oblivion. The only way to escape is to get in on the AI boom. In other words: Pack your bags and move to San Francisco. The meme is sort of a joke, but also, it’s not: While a select few 20-somethings in the Bay Area are being paid astronomical sums, new grads across the country are struggling to find jobs, perhaps due to AI. Still, during my trip, people seemed singularly concerned with securing their own future. The only mandate is to keep building and get rich.
In October, Mercor completed another funding round, which valued the company at $10 billion—five times as much as what it was worth when I visited this summer. Now Foody and his 22-year-old co-founders are the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. I messaged Foody to ask him what it’s like to be a billionaire. “Haha I don’t think about it much,” he insisted. To celebrate, the start-up rented out a nightclub. Foody told me more than 1,000 people showed up. They partied until 3 a.m.
