Building in public, failing in public: What it’s like to be a founder under 20 right now | TechCrunch0

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• July 25, 2026

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