Don't rely on family background, rely on AI. Teenagers have "written" million-dollar businesses with Claude, attracting 250,000 investors. Is Google Ventures actively seeking cooperation?
Ambitious young entrepreneurs are nothing new. Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft at the age of 19, and Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook at the same age. However, today's entrepreneurs are even younger, perhaps just kids with learner's permits and braces.
They start their entrepreneurial journeys in various ways: some begin with robot summer camps, some develop games on the Roblox platform, and others strike gold in the candy distribution business. The rapid development of AI has not only ignited their entrepreneurial passion but also accelerated their ability to turn ideas into reality.
A 14-year-old sophomore who has written only 10 lines of code founded an AI financial platform
Like all excellent tech entrepreneurs, Nick Dobroshinsky burns the midnight oil for his startup. However, this entrepreneur is in a special situation as he seems to have no other choice: he has to go to high school from 8 a.m. to 2:55 p.m. every day. After all, he is only 15 years old.
According to this sophomore from Sammamish, Washington, "Towards the end of eighth grade, I had the idea of starting a business. I spent a long time thinking about which problems could be solved with the help of AI." With the help of his mother, who works in the financial industry, he completed the initial market research. His father, who works in AI at a large tech company, provided him with early technical guidance.
Eventually, he settled on an entrepreneurial direction: using AI models to generate analysis reports for small and mid-cap listed companies. In July 2024, the AI financial research platform BeyondSPX was born. At that time, Dobroshinsky was only 14 years old. He revealed that this free platform currently covers more than 5,000 U.S. stocks, including those micro-cap stocks and over-the-counter stocks that receive little attention. It has exceeded 50,000 monthly active users and is used by 250,000 investors.
Dobroshinsky said that he has actually written only about 10 lines of code, and the company has no employees. He built BeyondSPX by giving instructions to the Claude model of the AI company Anthropic to generate software and integrating multiple models, including ChatGPT and Gemini, to generate content. The BeyondSPX platform combines quantitative financial data with qualitative AI analysis. It can generate long research summaries, support semantic stock searches, and provide supply chain visualization, intuitively showing the relationships between enterprises and their upstream and downstream suppliers and customers.
It is understood that BeyondSPX conducted relevant analysis on Greystone Logistics, and the company later issued a press release highly praising this independent analysis report. Brandon Hopkins, an independent investor relations advisor at Greystone Logistics, recalled, "I thought the analysis report was very well - summarized and had a very positive tone. I thought it would be a good idea to publish it. I even wondered, 'Maybe this person used AI to analyze all small and mid-cap companies in batches.'" At that time, he didn't know that the founder of this platform was only 15 years old.
Later, Dobroshinsky plans to start charging users. However, for now, he doesn't think it's valuable to form a marketing team. "I use a Reddit bot. If someone asks about good investment tools, my bot will reply, 'There are many good investment tools on the market, and BeyondSPX is one of them.'"
A 16-year-old teenager founded an AI fresh food delivery company with 48 employees
Kulveer Taggar, a venture capitalist based in San Francisco, said that in the past few years, the age of entrepreneurs has been gradually decreasing, which coincides with the popularity of AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. Now, it has become a common occurrence for him to receive business pitch emails from teenagers. Taggar said that part of the reason for this is that it has become easier to develop high - quality, scalable software. Although product promotion remains a challenge, young entrepreneurs may think that as long as they can master social platforms like TikTok and X, they can handle it.
"They have an eager drive and think, 'I can't wait for years. The opportunity is right in front of me.' The emergence of AI has undoubtedly given them the confidence that they can learn quickly and get started right away," Taggar added.
One of the companies Taggar invested in has a 16 - year - old co - founder, Raghav Arora. In May this year, this teenager was successfully selected by the startup incubator Y Combinator. Y Combinator does not set an age limit for applications; posting high - quality content on social platforms may attract the attention of venture capital institutions looking for young talents.
Arora's startup is called GetASAP, an AI - powered fresh food delivery company that predicts inventory needs for grocery stores. It purchases fruits and vegetables directly from farmers and delivers them to offline stores in the United States and Asia. Currently, this startup has 48 employees. Arora and his 20 - year - old co - founder led the company to successfully raise $3.4 million in a seed round of financing led by General Catalyst. However, Arora did not finish high school and now lives in Southern California, USA.
It is reported that his first entrepreneurial venture started during his studies in Singapore. He specifically sourced American candies that were hard to find in Asia and resold them to his classmates. This business made him a lot of money but also got him a three - day in - school suspension. This entrepreneurial experience taught him the ins and outs of product distribution and how to maximize profits by cutting out middlemen. Later, his customers also expanded to mom - and - pop grocery stores in Singapore. "At that time, I set the markup for various products at around 50%," Arora recalled.
An eighth - grader has started two businesses and met with multiple investors
Alby Churven, a 14 - year - old eighth - grader from Sydney, Australia, got the idea of starting a business after seeing teenage app developers become famous on social media. His entrepreneurial journey began with selling football socks online and developing Roblox games.
"To be honest, at first, I just wanted to make money. But as I spent more time on it, I really fell in love with it," he said. Recently, Churven submitted an application to Y Combinator. His application video, which contained a pun on six and seven, received millions of views on the X platform. During a recent trip to San Francisco, he took the opportunity to meet with multiple venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs.
Churven's first startup was a gamified educational app called Finkle. Later, he realized that this project had no potential for large - scale development and decided to "pull out" resolutely. Like all excellent entrepreneurs, Churven quickly adjusted his direction and launched a backup plan: an AI tool that can generate app and website code. Currently, he has found a co - founder and is working on developing this product and expanding his network.
"I want to seize this opportunity and make a profit." If AI programming tools are empowering a new generation of entrepreneurs, Churven hopes to be the developer and seller of such tools.
Ali Partovi is the head of the venture capital firm and startup accelerator Neo, which led the first - round financing of the popular AI programming tool Cursor. For years, he has been focused on investing in young entrepreneurs and often visits university campuses to discover potential talents. "The only core question I focus on is whether this person can attract more talented people than himself. However, these young entrepreneurs are really worth paying attention to, and I'm happy to invest in their second startup projects," Partovi said.
Although Partovi highly appreciates the daring spirit of high - school entrepreneurs, he also admits that he has many concerns when investing in them. In his opinion, high school may be the golden period for conceiving entrepreneurial ideas, but university is the crucial stage for building a network. Whether it's finding co - founders or recruiting early employees, these resources are essential for the success of a startup.
Conclusion
"The development of AI will make entrepreneurs younger and younger."
According to a general partner at Google Ventures, recently he was in contact with a three - person startup team, two of whom were 20 years old and one was only 17. This partner realized that if the company decides to invest, he may need to communicate with the parents of this underage founder first to confirm whether he is really mentally prepared to bear the hardships and challenges of the entrepreneurial journey.
Although he is optimistic about the trend of AI driving the youthfulness of entrepreneurs, he also clearly points out that not everyone can withstand the huge pressure of entrepreneurship at such a young age.
Reference link:https://cn.wsj.com/articles/teenage-founders-502cf69e
This article is from the WeChat public account "AI Frontline". Compiled by Hua Wei. Published by 36Kr with permission.