Bill Nguyen, a 30-year Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, has teamed up with five college students, including his son, to build Olive, an AI startup focused on teaching language models what we mean beyond the words we use. In the fall of 2024, six college students joined forces to start an AI company together. Five of them had met while studying computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The sixth, its CEO, was pursuing a degree in childhood and adolescent development at Sacramento State, with an eye on becoming a grade-school teacher. That wasn’t the only thing that made him an outlier. He also happened to have been in the tech industry for well over thirty years—longer than his fellow founders had been alive.