For 19-year-old Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, there is no middle ground. Either build a company as valuable as Google, he says, or fail and end up on the street. He started coding at age 15 in his native Kazakhstan, completed a couple of summer programs in San Francisco, and DMed every Y Combinator founder he could find on LinkedIn until one gave him an angel check for his first company at age 17.

That company, now YC-backed Nozomio, is an index API for AI agents (a tool that helps AI agents find and use software services) and has raised more than $6 million in funding to date. “I either win or lose, and a lot of young founders have the same mindset,” he told TechCrunch. “They just want to win.”

Young founders like Rakhmetzhanov are building under a new set of pressures. Investors are pouring more capital into them, but the expectation of reaching that “north star” milestone (the big number investors are chasing) has not relaxed, and every misstep along the way is now publicly discussed on social media.

While Silicon Valley venture capitalists have always loved backing young founders who dropped out of college, they preferred to see them paired with technical founders, or at least have some experience (ideally with a FAANG (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) company) on their resumes. In many ways, that is still very true. But artificial intelligence tools have democratized the opportunity to build, shortening the timelines for success and allowing more young people to start successful companies without setting foot inside a large technology company.

Pranjali Awasthi, 19, is a case in point. He dropped out of high school to launch an artificial intelligence startup, then attended Georgia Tech before also dropping out to launch Slashy, a YC-backed startup that bills itself as the “email cursor” and helps consumers manage their email inboxes. After more than a year running that company, he recently announced that he is now building a new startup that is currently under wraps.

When she was younger, around 14 or 15, she recalled, the investors she pitched to often asked her why she was looking to build a company. “It’s become more normal now,” he said, “after 18.”

It seems that more than ever investors are looking to founders like Awasthi, whose experiences can be traced through “GitHub activity, open source contributions, communities they’ve already built, and familiarity with the latest tools in AI,” Ashley Smith, general partner at early-stage firm Vermilion, told TechCrunch. “Many young developers learn to create software by contributing to open source projects or playing with the latest artificial intelligence tools,” he explained. “They have more time to do that while they’re in college or younger than someone with a full-time job and a mortgage.”

Smith said a “significant” portion of her portfolio is made up of companies founded by people under 30, and a handful even under 21, she said, adding that she is “clearly not skeptical of youth.”

“What they lack in experience they make up for in eagerness to experiment and lack of fear,” he continued.

But he admits the market has become more ruthless. “It no longer gives you room to learn slowly,” he said. There are more funding opportunities than ever, regardless of age: accelerators, incubators, pre-seed funds. But that money comes with strings attached: Founders like Rakhmetzhanov and Awasthi, flush with millions in cash, are expected to deliver growth in months, not years.

“The forgiveness that used to exist at an early stage and the assumption that the path to product-market fit would be repeated does not exist at this time,” Smith continued. “Everyone is looking for the next Cursor, although that growth trajectory is an outlier, not the norm.”

For many founders, especially those building publicly, the relentless tension to succeed can lead to murky ethical territory, or even predatory terms of treatment, as younger founders are often too new to the game to know what the standard is, but ambitious enough to pursue growth at all costs. To keep up, revenue figures start to look inflated, while creating content for social media starts to displace writing good code. Overposting is perhaps inevitable, as getting attention is now more difficult than ever in a crowded AI market.

It’s about who can convince “the most people.” [they] “They are smarter than everyone else in space,” Smith said, “and they make the biggest noise about it.”

“In 2004, you could silently iterate for years without anyone watching,” Awasthi added. “Now there’s this constant environmental pressure from LinkedIn and Twitter, where every raise, every milestone, every pivot is public.”

That means some young founders are not only worried about achieving competitive levels of revenue or funding valuations, but they are also under pressure to appear like a successful founder. That pressure has always existed in startup culture, but founders say it has become more extreme. “If you’re a startup competing in a market, you typically worry about the headlines,” Timothy Chen, an investor at Essence Ventures, told TechCrunch. “Now you worry about your neighbors.”

For example, “everyone is making shiny, attractive launch videos,” he noted. “It didn’t even exist three years ago.” The trend was popularized by Cluely founder Roy Lee, now about 22, whose startup initially promised to help students cheat on exams, a premise that dazzled investors like Andreessen Horowitz and helped the company raise $20 million.

Although Cluely is now more of a note-taking tool, Lee became the face of Silicon Valley’s young talent. “The pressure comes from, ‘I need to look much better, fast,’” Chen continued.

Not touching the bar has generated new anxiety. “When Zuck was building Facebook, there wasn’t this huge negative social ecosystem,” Aidan Guo, 20, told TechCrunch. He is the co-founder of AI desktop assistant startup Attention Engineering, which has raised around $1.6 million in funding to date.

Much of the tension, as he describes it, is self-imposed. “You already have a constant fear of failure in your mind. You have to steer the ship and learn all these things as you go. And everything can always go wrong at once,” he continued. “And then you have all these people piling on whatever you do wrong. I think people need to be more empathetic.”

Amidst all that pressure, Awasthi remembers the old days. “If you focus your time on what needs to be done, it’s not too difficult,” he said.

“The best product that stays active and talks to customers wins,” Rakhmetzhanov added.

In the end, all the founders describe the same thing: the fundamentals of a good startup have not changed: “conviction, intellectual honesty and customer obsession,” as Smith said. None of that has anything to do with age.