In the AI era, the post-2000 generation will be the main character.
Author: Liam, Deep Tide TechFlow
What were you doing in your early twenties?
Were you studying hard in the library for graduate school entrance exams, or burning the midnight oil in the lab to finish reports?
Were you revising your resume in a coffee shop, hoping for an internship at a big company, or were your parents urging you to take civil service exams, pursuing a "stable" life?
In the eyes of most people, young individuals in their twenties should be humble and confused, obeying experience and arrangements, accustomed to bowing to those in their forties.
But on the other side, some post-2000s are rewriting the script:
Some are dropping out of school to start businesses in their dorms, achieving a company valuation of $2 billion in two years;
Some are building the world's largest meme launch platform, valued at $4 billion, with revenues exceeding $700 million;
Some have just graduated and are already the heads of marketing at top exchanges.
They haven't gone through "ten years of menial work," but have stepped directly onto the stage at their most youthful and vigorous moments. This is not a coincidence of genius; AI and Web3 are reshaping the relationship between young people and power, wealth, and discourse.
In the old order, qualifications were a moat, and age was a threshold, but in the new world, these are rapidly becoming ineffective. The wave of technology has once again given young people opportunities that do not require waiting.
AI and Crypto are changing lives; this is the golden age belonging to the post-2000 generation.
A $2 Billion Unicorn Born in a Dorm
Brendan Foody is 21 this year, but he no longer worries about finding an internship.
The AI recruitment company Mercor has surpassed a valuation of $2 billion within two years, with clients including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Founders Fund, and annual revenue reaching $75 million. And Foody is the CEO of this company.
In 2021, when most second-year students were still troubled by their major courses, 19-year-olds Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha were planning a "revolution" in their dorms at Harvard and Georgetown.
Their meeting was quite dramatic; they met in a high school debate team and teamed up to compete in the American Policy Debate Championship, winning the championship. Coincidentally, the topic they debated at the time was about the unfairness of the job market, especially the employment discrimination issues in developing countries.
Perhaps it was fate; this debate became the 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 to help startups, but when they hired remote programmers from India, they discovered a huge opportunity: the global distribution of talent is very uneven, presenting significant arbitrage opportunities.
For example, there are many excellent technical talents in places like India who have low salary expectations but are overlooked, while talent in Silicon Valley is concentrated but highly competitive and expensive.
They quickly realized that for startups, what truly matters is people, not software.
At the same time, with the emergence of ChatGPT, a new idea began to emerge: to use large language models to simulate senior interviewers, automatically assess talent, and help employers break geographical limitations to find the most suitable candidates.
In 2023, the three dropped out of school, and Mercor was officially established.
In the early days, they were simply a recruitment agency, manually connecting AI startups with remote engineers in India, but within a few months, they generated $1 million in revenue and $80,000 in profit.
Soon after, Mercor evolved into a fully-fledged AI-driven recruitment service. Job seekers upload their resumes and must undergo 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 Silicon Valley legend Peter Thiel for young entrepreneurs who drop out of school. They became the first entrepreneurial team in history to be collectively selected, providing them not only with financial 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, they raised $3.6 million in a seed round;
In early 2024, they raised $32 million in Series A, with a valuation of $250 million;
In February 2025, they raised $100 million in Series B, with a valuation of $2 billion.
In less than two years, the valuation increased eightfold.
Even more astonishingly, to secure Mercor's Series A investment, 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%. Global top AI labs, including OpenAI, are their clients.
Three young individuals with an average age of 21 have become the youngest members of the billion-dollar club.
Mercor also has a unique entrepreneurial culture, actively recruiting outstanding peers who have dropped out, 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 and more young people are no longer wasting time methodically finishing college but are directly engaging in innovative practices.
The dormitory entrepreneurship story of Mercor is just the tip of the iceberg for post-2000 AI entrepreneurship.
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, Dang Jiacheng dropped out of his sophomore year at Berkeley to establish FlowGPT, creating the world's largest AI prompt community, attracting over 4 million monthly active users; Eric Steinberger, born in 2000, began AI research at 14, collaborated with Meta researchers during high school, and later founded Magic.dev, raising $465 million with a valuation of $1.5 billion;
There’s also the post-2000 Stanford PhD student Hong Letong, focusing on "AI mathematics + quantitative finance," whose company is estimated to be worth $300-500 million even before launching a product; and Chi Guangyao from Yuhua Technology, who transitioned from a liberal arts background to AI agent enterprise services, with annual revenue nearing $10 million, serving large enterprises including China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.
A clear picture is being drawn: In the AI era, the post-2000 generation will be the main character.
21-Year-Old Builds $4 Billion Valuation Crypto Platform
If Mercor's success is a "serious narrative" under systematic training, then the rise of pump.fun is more like a wild experiment directed by a group of post-2000s.
Noah Tweedale, Alon Cohen, and Dylan Kerler, with an average age of only about 21, co-founded the world's largest meme coin issuance platform.
In just one year, Pump.fun generated over $700 million in protocol revenue, with a single-day revenue peak exceeding $7 million, becoming the most profitable crypto application at one point.
The starting point of this storm came from the meme coin 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 was not easy: deploying contracts, configuring liquidity, listing on exchanges… the process was complex and costly, blocking countless ordinary users and grassroots creators.
The pump.fun team saw this pain point, and their solution was simple and straightforward: one-click token issuance.
Users only need to upload an image, name it, and pay a few dollars in gas fees to launch a token within five minutes. No programming skills, no white papers, and no idealistic narratives are required; as long as it is interesting and has a topic, it can attract buyers.
The platform uses a pricing model called "Bonding Curve," where the token price automatically rises with the purchase volume. When the token's market value reaches $69,000, it will automatically "graduate" to the mainstream decentralized exchange Raydium and begin normal trading.
This process is designed to be as fun as a game: creators need to actively promote or hype their tokens to gain enough attention, while buyers search for treasures among various quirky tokens, looking for their next "Dogecoin."
To increase the fun, pump.fun also launched a live streaming feature, allowing creators to "sell" their coins in front of the camera.
This quickly evolved into a magical realism showcase: some promised to shave their heads if their token's market value exceeded a million dollars, while others set themselves on fire live… Controversial content emerged endlessly, and eventually, pump.fun had 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, accumulating revenue exceeding $700 million; in July, it was valued at $4 billion, raising $1.3 billion…
But this success story also has its dark side.
Data shows that the "graduation rate" (successful listing 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 of over $100 million, while the lifespan of the vast majority of tokens is only a few days or even a few hours.
In the eyes of critics, pump.fun is nothing more than a "giant on-chain casino." It takes a 1% transaction fee from each trade, profiting from users' excitement, fantasies, and even disappointments.
The three founders behind the platform have remained mysterious.
They are active on X and Discord under IDs like Sapijiju and A1on, rarely showing their faces, primarily for safety reasons; being young and suddenly wealthy is the most dangerous label in the crypto world. Moreover, some members have a checkered past; according to Vanity Fair, Kerler created multiple rug-pull projects at the age of 16, cashing out nearly $400,000.
Alon stated in a podcast, most altcoins are essentially memes. We just laid this bare.
Their philosophy is to allow everyone to become a node in the "attention economy," directly converting emotions from social networks into financial assets.
Undeniably, this team has achieved disruptive innovation.
They have 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 crypto world, the post-2000 generation is the absolute main character. Many have directly skipped traditional investment paths like the stock market and real estate, immersing themselves in on-chain experiments and adventures since high school or even earlier.
According to Forbes, Barron Trump, born in 2006, has already earned over $40 million through cryptocurrency and serves as the Web3 ambassador for the family’s crypto project.
In the crypto circle, such stories are no longer rare.
A post-2000 individual, who spends day and night staring at the screen in a rental apartment and is seen by neighbors as "not doing anything serious," might suddenly become a millionaire in the wave of on-chain Memecoins; you might think that the young person quietly working in a state-owned enterprise is actually an anonymous whale managing a million-dollar fund pool, with their job being 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, becoming the commanding leaders, many people feel a deep discomfort: Why? On what basis?
But, adults, the times have truly changed.
Recently, in the world of blockchain and AI, two pieces of news emerged in succession, as if announcing the arrival of a new era to everyone.
28-year-old Chinese-American Alexandr Wang became Meta's Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, leading a group of AI prodigies with a net worth of $14.3 billion, even requiring 64-year-old Turing Award winner Yann LeCun to report to him.
24-year-old Claudia Wang, shortly after graduating, became the Head of Marketing at the globally renowned exchange Bybit, leading the brand and marketing efforts of this established trading platform.
Both have faced skepticism.
For 28-year-old Alexandr, the doubts mainly come from traditional forces in Silicon Valley: Can a dropout really lead the AI strategy of a company as large as Meta? He even directly overturned the development roadmap previously set by Turing Award winner LeCun.
But facts speak louder than words: The Scale AI that Alexandr founded made him the youngest self-made billionaire in the world by 2021, providing critical data labeling services for top AI labs like OpenAI and Google.
Now, for Wang, Zuckerberg has invested 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, skepticism comes more from within the industry: Can a recent graduate from the post-2000 generation really lead the global brand and marketing of a well-known exchange like Bybit?
Setting aside age, her resume speaks for itself: from being the president of the Blockchain Association at Peking University to being a partner at Trustless Labs involved in project incubation, and then a founding member of StakeStone responsible for BD and marketing, she also has experience as an investment analyst at the 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 is often equated with experience and qualifications, with seniority symbolizing authority. A 40-year-old director should naturally manage a 30-year-old manager, and a 50-year-old vice president should logically guide a 35-year-old supervisor.
In an era of rapid technological iteration, the "best practices" of ten years ago may have become today's "historical burdens." Although young people may lack traditional experience, they possess something more important: the speed of learning, adaptability, and innovation capability. They do not have the mindset of "this is how it should be done" and dare to try innovations that traditional industries consider "impossible" or "should not be done."
In the future, it will gradually become the norm for post-90s and post-2000s individuals to rise to executive positions in fields like AI and blockchain. In these areas, drive is more important than qualifications; compared to middle-aged individuals who are accustomed to being complacent, the energetic post-90s and post-2000s are more favored by investors and founders.
And we, the "middle-aged," will need to get used to this norm in the future: reporting to young people.
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