Kevin Hartz tends to be first through the door. In 2001, he co-founded Xoom, back when sending money across borders meant standing in line at Western Union. In 2013, it went public, and in 2015, PayPal paid $1.1 billion for it. Four years after launching Xoom, he co-founded Eventbrite, which went public in 2018 and turned buying event tickets into something you could do without wanting to throw your laptop in the ocean.
After a stint at Founders Fund, Hartz co-founded his own venture firm, A* Capital (a nod to a computer science algorithm), then in 2020, he spotted another trend before the masses: the SPAC boom. His blank-check company, “one,” swallowed up 3D printing outfit Markforged in a $2.1 billion reverse merger in 2021, right as every other financier in Silicon Valley suddenly decided SPACs were the future.
Now Hartz is onto his next thing — teenage founders, not as a social experiment but as an unplanned investment thesis. His firm recently cut a check to Aaru, an AI-powered prediction engine with one founder who was too young to get his driver’s license at the time. Hartz is not alone in this by any stretch. The dropout-and-build movement, made most famous by founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, is becoming a standard lifestyle choice for a certain kind of ambitious kid.
Consider Cory Levy, who was interning at Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures, and Techstars while still in high school, then bailed on the University of Illinois after freshman year. Today he runs Z Fellows, a one-week accelerator that hands technical founders — even high schoolers — $10,000 grants. When Levy dropped out a decade ago, the Thiel Fellowship was a radical new idea. Now, the “community of dropouts is at an all-time high,” he told Business Insider last spring. “At a big group dinner of 15 or 20 people, we’ll look around the table, and no one has a college degree.”
It’s becoming enough of a “thing” that the accelerator Y Combinator, which has quietly reinforced drop-out culture since its outset, recently rolled out a program that’s designed for students who want to start companies but don’t want to drop out. The program allows them to apply while still in school, get accepted and funded immediately, and defer their participation in YC until after they graduate. (For YC, known for being countercultural, the move is very on brand.)
Naturally, TechCrunch has been covering the trend: see here and here and here. But to learn more, I’ll be sitting down with Hartz at the StrictlyVC event inside TechCrunch’s rollicking Disrupt show, kicking off in San Francisco on Monday, October 27. (Hartz is talking on Tuesday, October 28.)
In the meantime, here are excerpts from a chat we had on Friday, where we started to explore the topic:
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