Boomers had Jobs. Millennials had Zuck. Where are Gen Z’s tech founders?

Silicon Valley has long obsessed over the young, disruptive founder. So where are Gen Z’s tech founders?

Boomers had Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos. Gen X produced Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, and Peter Thiel. Millennials boasted droves of swaggering disruptors: Mark “I’m CEO, Bitch,” Zuckerberg, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Brian Chesky, and, more notoriously, Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried — all of whom were upending norms, in the spotlight, and on their way to billions by their early 20s.

Now the oldest members of Gen Z are 27 — yet there’s no Zoomer Zuck in sight. Their generation has been billed as coddled, complacent, and uninterested in the grind, intent on drawing hard lines in work-life balance. Millennials give off girlboss vibes; Gen Zers tout “lazy girl jobs.” Move fast and break things? No cap, that’s sus.

In reality, zoomers aren’t to blame for their lack of progress in Silicon Valley. Gen Z founders and would-be founders are stepping into a vastly different tech world from that of their predecessors — a world where launching a unicorn is far more difficult, and publicly scrutinized, than it was for the garage-band generation of Jobs and Gates. And that has prompted many Gen Zers to question whether they even want to strive for that level of world-conquering superstardom.

Founders “are as zealous and as smart as they were 20 years ago,” said Jerry Neumann, a venture capitalist and adjunct professor at Columbia University. It’s the tech industry itself that isn’t evolving as rapidly as it once did. When millennials were young, the internet was new, nearly lawless, and ripe not necessarily for disruption but for defining. Then came the iPhone, a technological advance that changed society, making ideas like Uber, Instagram, and Bumble possible. Gen Z is coming of age in an era when the same Big Tech companies are diffuse and dominant. “There’s just not that same technological opportunity to build big companies fast,” Neumann said. In other words, millennial founders ran so that Gen Z founders could walk.

Today, young founders are mostly left to work on incremental technological innovations in a mature market, which are often bought up by the bigger companies well before their founders become household names. That may mark a successful startup exit but not a path to fame. “In order to be the next Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, you need to be a disruptor,” said Kimberly Eddleston, a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern University. These big-name founders “either disrupted an industry or created a brand-new industry,” she added. As the tech industry’s biggest companies have maintained their hold, they’ve acquired competitors and new technologies. Even if Facebook doesn’t carry the same cache of cool as it did in 2009, nearly half of humanity still uses Meta’s various — mostly acquired — products, like Instagram and WhatsApp, without any clear upstart challengers.

Entrepreneurial Gen Zers are also facing a tougher road to funding. Gone are the days of walking into Thiel’s office in a hoodie and watching him make it rain. From the final quarter of 2021 to the final quarter of 2023, venture-capital investment plummeted from $52.8 billion to $10.6 billion, the lowest of any quarter since 2019. Rising interest rates, paired with the cautionary tales of the likes of Adam Neumann and Holmes, have increased scrutiny. Though that makes the barrier to entry for a tech startup higher, perhaps the ideas that survive it will be more valuable. “There’s been a good refresh,” said Alexandra Debow, a 22-year-old who dropped out of New York University and has raised pre-seed money for her photo-sharing social app Swsh. “People don’t just want hype. People want true value behind it.”

AI firms are the exception to the trend, and investors are still pouring money into them. Perhaps not coincidentally, that’s also the industry in which perhaps the biggest Gen Z founder reigns. Alexandr Wang, the 27-year-old who cofounded Scale AI in 2016 when dropping out of MIT, has become one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, with a net worth of $2 billion. His company employs contractors who do the grunt work of labeling data for companies to train machine-learning models. And while Wang has become the subject of profiles in major publications, his name calls up little recognition outside the tech world. Scale AI did not make Wang available for an interview for this story.

There’s also a vibe shift among younger founders: Some are less interested in becoming massive public figures and facing the backlash that ultimately follows. They grew up in a trail of destruction left by rapid tech advances. They’ve seen a smiling Zuckerberg on the cover of Wired in 2016 under the headline “Could Facebook Save Your Life?” and they’ve seen him on the cover again just 15 months later, his face bruised and bloodied, with the outlet teasing a feature about “how a confused, defensive social media giant steered itself into a disaster.”

The young founder era was likely more myth than reality.

“When you move fast and break things in healthcare, you go to jail,” said Ibrahim Rashid, 27, who founded Strong Haulers, a startup meant to help people manage their symptoms of illnesses like long COVID. “When you move fast and break things in social media, you destroy elections.” Rashid didn’t set out to be a founder, but his personal experience with long COVID gave him the idea. He started the company in 2022 but has kept working in sustainable investing while building it.

Rashid said he closely followed the story of Holmes, who is now serving 11 years in prison for defrauding investors and lying about the ability of her technology at Theranos to diagnose a wide variety of diseases from a drop of blood. There’s also Bankman-Fried and Martin Shkreli, who were on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Enough past hotshots have gone on to ignominy that the list has come to be known as cursed; last year, Forbes even began a “Hall of Shame” for its disgraced recipients. (Rashid ultimately did not make the final “30 Under 30” list for 2023, for which he was submitted.) When Alexis Barreyat, a cofounder of the social-media app BeReal, was named to Fortune’s “40 Under 40” list in 2022 at 27, his entry appeared not with a headshot but a blank avatar. Barreyat did not respond to emailed questions for this story.

Several young founders think the spotlight might not be worth the scrutiny. “We try to take a lot more conservative approaches,” said Julian Kage, a 19-year-old student at the University of Chicago who founded the diagnostic testing startup Exactics with other undergrads. “We want success, but we can see the downfall of how terrible being famous can be. I don’t think we feel quite the same need to be put on a pedestal.” Instead, he said, his startup has been slow to engage with the press and social media. It’s starting to make content for social media, like educational videos. But Kage said the company wanted the science and the product “to speak for themselves,” rather than taking on the role of talking head.

Gen Z is more values-driven in the workplace than older generations. In a Deloitte survey, about 40% of young workers said they’d turned down employers that didn’t align with their values or rejected work assignments they found unethical — about 35% of millennials said the same. That plays into how founders think about their companies and themselves. Gen Zers “expect you to be more casual and show up more as your full self,” Debow said. There’s little division between a Monday-morning office persona and a Friday-at-the-bar persona. It’s partly from a place of encouraging authenticity, but also from growing up in an always-online, and always-watched, generation during which cancel culture took hold.

With investors taking fewer risks and innovation happening at more incremental levels, Eddleston said the path to megasuccessful business owner seems to be operating backward; instead of people getting famous for their ideas, more people profit off their fame with a brand line. Think: Kylie Jenner’s beauty line or the YouTuber Emma Chamberlain’s coffee. These are safer bets for investors, she said, but safe bets could pass over innovation. “I’m nervous we’re losing” the pioneering, American individualistic persona, Eddleston said.

Perhaps we won’t see Gen Z founders standing before a crowd and unveiling their latest shiny products anytime soon. But the young-founder era was likely more myth than reality. Though the brash Harvard dropout has long had an outsize hold on the public imagination, the number of people under 30 who owned companies in 2015 (when millennials solidly made up the 20-to-30 age cohort) had dropped by 65% from the 1980s. Harvard Business Review research found in 2018 that the most successful founders in recent years began their companies at an average age of 45. That’s good news not just for Gen Z but also for millennials — the oldest of whom turned 43 this year. Success could still be on the horizon.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.