Author: Liam, Deep Tide TechFlow
What were you doing in your early twenties?
Is it studying hard in the library for graduate exams, or staying up late in the lab to finish reports?
Is it revising resumes in coffee shops, waiting for a big company internship, or being pushed by parents to take exams in pursuit of a 'stable' life?
In the eyes of most people, young individuals in their twenties should be humble and confused, following the experience and arrangements, and accustomed to bowing their heads to middle registrars who are 40 years old.
But on the other end, some post-2000s individuals are rewriting the script:
Some dropped out of school in dormitories and built a company with a valuation of $2 billion in two years;
Someone created the world's largest Meme launch platform, valued at $4 billion, with revenue exceeding $700 million;
Some have just graduated and already sit in high-ranking marketing positions at top exchanges.
They did not endure 'ten years as a junior,' but rather stepped onto the stage at their youngest and most vigorous age. This is not a chance encounter of genius; AI and Web3 are reshaping the relationship between youth and power, wealth, and discourse.
In the old order, seniority was the moat, age was the barrier, but in the new world, these are rapidly becoming ineffective. The wave of technology has once again given young people opportunities that require no waiting.
AI and crypto are changing lives; this is the golden age belonging to the post-2000s.
A $2 billion unicorn born in a dormitory
Brendan Foody is 21 this year, but he no longer worries about finding internships.
AI recruiting company Mercor, within two years, saw its valuation exceed $2 billion, with clients including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Founders Fund, and annual revenue reaching $75 million. And Foody is the CEO of this company.
In 2021, while most second-year students were still worrying about their major courses, three 19-year-olds, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, were planning a 'revolution' in dormitories at Harvard and Georgetown.
Their acquaintance is quite dramatic; they met in high school debate club, formed a team for the American policy debate competition, and won the championship. Coincidentally, the topic they debated at that time was about the unfairness in the job market, especially the employment discrimination issues in developing countries.
Perhaps it was fate's arrangement; this debate became a source of inspiration for their future entrepreneurship.
Initially, they just wanted to create a small side business, hoping to quickly learn how to develop software and help startups, but while hiring remote programmers from India, they discovered a huge opportunity: the global distribution of talent is highly uneven, presenting significant arbitrage opportunities.
For instance, there are many excellent, low-paid yet overlooked tech talents in places like India, while talent in Silicon Valley, although concentrated, faces fierce competition and is costly.
They quickly realized that for startups, what truly matters is people, not software.
At the same time, ChatGPT was born, and a new idea began to emerge: using large language models to simulate senior interviewers, automatically assessing talent, and helping employers break geographical barriers to find the most suitable candidates.
In 2023, the three dropped out simultaneously, and Mercor was officially established.
In the early stages, they were simply a recruitment agency, manually connecting AI startups with remote engineers from India, but within a few months, they created $1 million in revenue and $80,000 in profit.
Soon, Mercor evolved into a complete entity, powered by AI-driven recruitment services. Job seekers upload their resumes and have a 20-minute video interview with the AI system, which then creates a personal profile and automatically matches suitable positions. Companies only need to submit job descriptions, and the AI can recommend the best candidates.
In 2024, all three founders were selected for the Thiel Fellowship, a funding program established by legendary Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel for young entrepreneurs who drop out to start businesses. They also became the first entrepreneurial team in history to be collectively selected, providing them not only with funding support but, more importantly, opening the doors to the top investment circles in Silicon Valley.
The subsequent fundraising journey was like riding a rocket.
In September 2023, $3.6 million seed round;
In early 2024, $32 million Series A, valuation of $25 million;
In February 2025, $100 million Series B, valuation of $2 billion
In less than two years, the valuation has increased eightfold.
Even more shocking is that to secure the Series A investment for Mercor, top venture capital firm Benchmark even sent a private jet to transport the three founders to the negotiations. Such 'superstar' treatment is almost unimaginable in traditional industries.
Today, Mercor's annual revenue has reached $75 million, with a monthly growth rate of 51%. Top AI labs worldwide, including OpenAI, are among their clients.
Three young individuals with an average age of 21 became the youngest members of the billion-dollar club.
Mercor also has a unique entrepreneurial culture, heavily recruiting excellent peers who are dropouts, with an average employee age of only 22, creating a vibrant young team. Brendan believes that the barriers to entrepreneurship are much lower than before, and more young people are no longer wasting time going through university step by step but are directly engaging in innovative practices.
The dormitory entrepreneurship story of Mercor is just the tip of the iceberg for AI entrepreneurship by the post-2000s.
22-year-old Chinese-American Jessica Wu dropped out of MIT to found the AI agency Sola Solutions, securing a total of $21 million in investments, including from a16z;
Born in 2002, Party Jiacheng dropped out of Berkeley's sophomore year to found FlowGPT, creating the world's largest AI prompt community, attracting over 4 million monthly active users; born in 2000, Eric Steinberger began AI research at 14, collaborated with Meta researchers during high school, later founded Magic.dev, and secured $465 million in funding with a valuation of $1.5 billion;
There are also post-2000s Stanford PhD student Hong Letong, focusing on 'AI mathematics + quantitative finance,' whose company is estimated to be valued at $300-500 million even before having a product; and Chi Guangyao from Yuhua Technology, who transitioned from a liberal arts background to AI Agent enterprise services, achieving nearly $10 million in annual revenue, with clients including large enterprises like China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.
A clear picture is being drawn: in the AI era, the post-2000s will be the protagonists.
21 years old, created a $4 billion valued crypto platform
If Mercor's success is a 'serious narrative' under systemic training, then the rise of pump.fun is more like a wild experiment directed by a group of post-2000s individuals.
Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerler, with an average age of about 21, teamed up to establish the world's largest Meme coin issuance platform.
In just one year, Pump.fun created over $700 million in protocol revenue, with single-day revenue peaks exceeding $7 million, becoming once the most profitable crypto application.
The starting point of this storm arose from the Memecoin craze that erupted in the Solana ecosystem in early 2024.
At that time, speculators were frantically chasing the next 'hundredfold Meme coin,' but issuing a token is not easy: deploying contracts, configuring liquidity, listing on exchanges... The process is complex and costly, blocking countless ordinary users and grassroots creators.
The pump.fun team identified this pain point, and their solution was simple and straightforward: one-click token issuance.
Users only need to upload a picture, choose a name, and pay a few dollars in gas fees to launch a token within five minutes. No programming skills are required, no white papers needed, and no idealistic narratives are necessary; as long as it is interesting and has a topic, it can attract buyers.
The platform employs a pricing model called 'Bonding Curve,' where token prices automatically rise with purchasing volume. When the token's market value reaches $69,000, it will automatically 'graduate' to the mainstream decentralized exchange Raydium, starting normal trading.
This process is designed to be as fun as a game: creators need to actively promote or shout out to attract enough attention for their tokens, while buyers search for treasures among various quirky tokens, looking for their next 'Dogecoin.'
To add fun, pump.fun also launched a live streaming feature, allowing creators to promote their tokens on camera.
This quickly evolved into a magical realism showcase: some promised to shave their heads if the token's market value exceeded a million dollars, while others ignited themselves on site... Controversial content emerged endlessly, ultimately forcing pump.fun to temporarily take down the live-streaming feature.
Even so, the expansion momentum of pump.fun remains unstoppable.
By 2025, the platform had launched over 8.7 million tokens and generated cumulative revenue exceeding $700 million; in July, it raised $1.3 billion at a valuation of $4 billion...
But this success story also has its dark side.
Data shows that the 'graduation rate' (successful launch on DEX) of tokens issued on pump.fun is only 1.4%, meaning that 98.6% of projects ultimately go to zero. Only a few tokens on the platform can maintain a market value above $100 million, and the life cycle of the vast majority of tokens is only a few days or even hours.
In the eyes of critics, pump.fun is nothing more than a 'big casino on the chain.' It takes a 1% fee from each transaction, profiting from users' excitement, fantasies, and even disappointments.
And the three founders behind the platform remain mysterious.
They are active on X and Discord under IDs like Sapijiju and A1on, rarely showing themselves, primarily for safety reasons; being young and wealthy is the most dangerous label in the crypto world. Moreover, some members have a checkered past; according to (Vanity Fair), Kerler created several rug-pull projects at the age of 16, cashing out nearly $400,000.
Alon stated in a podcast that most altcoins are essentially memes. We are just laying this bare.
Their philosophy is to allow everyone to become a node in the 'attention economy,' directly transforming emotions on social networks into financial assets.
It is undeniable that this team has achieved disruptive innovation.
They redefined the act of 'issuing tokens' with simple product logic and barrier-breaking design: from a privilege of professional players to a game for the masses.
In the wild world of crypto, post-2000s individuals are the absolute protagonists. Many have directly skipped traditional investment paths such as the stock market and real estate, immersing themselves in on-chain experiments and adventures from high school or even earlier.
According to (Forbes), Barron Trump, born in 2006, has earned over $40 million through cryptocurrency and serves as the Web3 ambassador for the family’s crypto project.
In the crypto world, such stories are no longer rare.
A post-2000s individual who stares at the screen day and night in a rented room, viewed by neighbors as 'not doing anything productive,' might overnight become a millionaire amidst the Memecoin craze; you might think that the young person working quietly in a state-owned enterprise is actually an anonymous whale managing a pool of millions of dollars, treating work as just a leisurely side gig...
Wealth is circulating and being distributed to the younger generation at an unprecedented speed on the blockchain.
Reporting to young people
Some young people are starting to become bosses, while others have already taken on executive positions.
When post-2000s and post-90s individuals bypass the corners of the conference table and walk directly to the center stage as leaders issuing commands, many feel deep discomfort: why? Why them?
But, adult, times have really changed.
Recently, two news stories emerged in the blockchain and AI world, seemingly announcing the arrival of a new era.
28-year-old Chinese-American Alexandr Wang became Meta's Chief AI Officer, leading a group of AI elites with a net worth of $14.3 billion, even Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, 64, has to report to him.
24-year-old Claudia Wang, shortly after graduation, became the Head of Marketing at the globally renowned exchange Bybit, leading the branding and marketing efforts of this established trading platform.
Both have faced skepticism.
For 28-year-old Alexandr, the skepticism mainly comes from traditional forces in Silicon Valley: Can a dropout really lead a company like Meta in AI strategy? He even directly overturned the development roadmap previously set by Turing Award winner LeCun.
But facts speak louder than words: Alexandr's Scale AI made him the world's youngest self-made billionaire in 2021, as his company provided essential data labeling services for top AI labs such as OpenAI and Google.
Now, for Wang, Zuckerberg has spent a whopping $14.3 billion to acquire 49% of Scale AI. It can be said that it is truly 'buying a company for one person.'
For Claudia, the doubts mainly come from within the industry: Can a recent graduate from the post-2000s really lead a well-known global brand and marketing like Bybit?
Setting aside age, her resume speaks volumes: from the president of the Blockchain Association at Peking University, to being a partner at Trustless Labs involved in project incubation, to a founding member of StakeStone, responsible for BD and marketing, and also having experience as an investment analyst at leading dollar fund IDG Capital.
Under Claudia's leadership, Bybit launched a new brand identity and the #IMakeIt marketing campaign.
In traditional corporate culture, age often equates to experience; seniority is a symbol of authority. A 40-year-old director should, of course, manage a 30-year-old manager, while a 50-year-old vice president should naturally guide a 35-year-old supervisor.
In an era of rapid technological iteration, what was considered 'best practice' ten years ago may have become today’s 'historical burden.' Young people may lack traditional experience but possess more important qualities: speed of learning, adaptability, and innovative ability. They do not have the mindset of 'this is how it should be done' and are bold enough to try innovations that traditional industries deem 'impossible' or 'should not be done.'
In the future, it will gradually become the norm for post-90s and post-2000s individuals to leapfrog into executive positions in fields like AI and blockchain. In these sectors, drive is more important than seniority; compared to middle-aged individuals who are accustomed to taking it easy, the energetic post-90s and post-2000s are more favored by investors and founders.
And we, the 'Middle Registrars,' will have to get used to this new normal: reporting to young people.
